New to SFML?

Before we get started, let me just say welcome to my tutorial site, SFML Coder. If you’d like to read more about the blog, or me, see the relevant about pages. Let me also say, congratulations on choosing SFML. It’s a great library: powerful and easy to use, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have!

So you’ve made the good decision to use SFML, but where do you go from here? In the next few sections I’ll provide you with links and information to get you on the road to making your first video game!

General Experience with C++

If you are completely happy with C++, you can skip this one. Otherwise, you might want to check out my video series ‘SFML Coder’s C++ Primer‘ or the written tutorial on the C++ Resource Network. To use SFML, you need to know how to use classes, if not make your own. However, for the most part I’ll be assuming you understand the C++ concepts involved in our programming efforts.

If you aren’t yet comfortable with the language, don’t be put off – still feel free to dive in once you have a basic C++ knowledge. I’ll try to provide tutorial links about difficult features where relevant, and you can, of course, ask me questions via the contact page or Q & A.

Getting set up with SFML

Now then, the part of using SFML which most often causes trouble to beginners is the setup process. But don’t be demoralised – I have constructed tutorials for this purpose, and once setup is done, it’s mostly plain sailing from there on.

So here are links to some of my introductory tutorials and posts.

Preliminaries

• Introduction
• Target Audience
• Our goals – ‘What is to be done?’
• What we’ll be using – ‘Tools of the Trade’

Building SFML 2.0

• Building for Visual Studio (with NMake); for Windows
• Building for Code::Blocks or MinGW (with MinGW make); for Windows
• Building for GCC with Make; for Ubuntu or other Unix operating systems
• Building the documentation for SFML 2.0

Getting started with SFML 2.0

• A first SFML project
• Visual Studio/Visual C++ Express
• Code::Blocks (Windows)
• Code::Blocks (Ubuntu)
• Makefile (MinGW/Windows)
• Makefile (GCC/Unix)
• A Minimal SFML application

Where next?

Well by this stage, you should feel ready to embrace the world of C++ and SFML, but what’s the next step? Well you can check out my SFML tutorials page, where you can follow links to learn about events, images, sounds and more! You might also want to visit the C++ Resource Network and the official SFML site. On each, you will find a lot of documentation and tutorial material, and I also suggest you register for an account with each so you can make use of the forums. I’m on there under the name Xander314.

Related articles

• SFML Graphics – Images and Sprites (sfmlcoder.wordpress.com)
• SFML Graphics – Fonts and Text (sfmlcoder.wordpress.com)
• SFML Bindings (sfmlcoder.wordpress.com)
• SFML Event Handling (sfmlcoder.wordpress.com)