About text output

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Hello JGO!

Registred at your site today, Have to say that I love your registration process, best one i’ve seen so far :wink:

So I’ve just started to work on my first game project a few weeks ago.It’s nothing fancy just for me to learn how game makeing works and have a bit of fun.
Choosed to try and clone a old Star Trek game I played long ago(Forgotten it’s name of course :().
I remember it as a semi-text based game where you travel your ship to various planets on a map,constantly keeping an eye on fuel levels and supplies, and of course for any nasty klingon that might show up.
Everything has been going really well so far, sorted out some basic collision detection,ship movement and running it on a thread. But I’m not so happy about the GUI yet.
But it’s a big thing I haven’t gotten working yet and didnt find anything usefull on google either so I though I could ask you guys here for some expert help :slight_smile:

So what I want to do is updating a JTextArea with all the text from my game, for example when my ship collide with planet 101 I want it to output my welcome message for that specific planet and so on.
I tried to do it simple with the “setText” method, but i only got that to work from inside the same class where my JTextArea was, and it didnt update the text at all just overwrite it with the next line.
So yeah, any help on how to update my game text would be very appreciated!

//Sam

#2

Looks like your Google-Fu was off a little: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/components/editorpane.html :wink:

#3

setText(getText() + theNewLine)?

#4

Try to not mix swing in your game. Build your own class which is able to render string and warp them. It’s painful but worth it.

#5

Thanks guys, finally got it working.
If I should’nt mix swing into my game I’ve done a quite big misstake now as most of my game is based on it,
but will look into an own rendering class. Will be very painfull and very time consumeing for a noob like me i’m sure!

And yes my google-fu will always be a bit off :wink:

#6

Even though the OP will probably move away from Swing, just for completeness I’d recommend using JTextArea.append(text) rather than the approach above. A little cleaner, not to mention teh more efficient!!!1

Why they added that method (and insert()) to JTextArea and not JTextComponent is beyond me. You shouldn't have to resort to modifying the Document or replaceSelection() to do standard text operations efficiently. Ah well.