I have an app running in full screen mode. Now I want an area along the bottom for player info. How do you go about creating some kind of panel that will float above the screen.
The main playing area is a 1024x1024 board. Think risk, like an area at the base of the screen, that will show your current cards. Any pointers to howto’s would be great thanks.
If you check out Wurm you’ll see that have little tabs at the bottom of there window.
Although this isn’t exactly what you are looking for since there is a real solution to this, there’s nothing really wrong with just drawing right over the bottom of the screen if it’s a HUD…
Of couse, if you want buttons and GUI components, then it would be to your benefit to actually place Swing components there as described in Brackeen’s book. Just remember to disable their repainting scheme, otherwise you’ll end up with a mess of repaints.
WURM is an OpenGL prgoram.
Im prrtty sure they are cretaing textures on the fly and rendering them to polygons co-incident with the screen.
However it soudsn to me like what youare doing is a 2D game using Full Screen Exlcusive mdoe, yes? The answer is that ocne you’ve tkane control of the screen it is yours to draw to. So in order to create one thing “over” another you just need to control the order in which you BLT your data to the buffer before you flip it.
HUDs by definiton are always drawn last.
if you want areas of your HUD to show whatw as drawn "behind’ it you just need to do a BLT with Alpha. Note however that there are some limits in how Java2D handles Alpha values. Im not sure what the latest state of these limits is, how many still exist. Others doing 2D work in Tiger could probably tell you or you could try looking at the Tiger release notes.
Thanks, yep thats working. Got the HUD working. Now I just need to design a better looking gif to overlay. Thanks.