Improving Look and Feel of Swing Components

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Greetings. Below is a link to my permanent work in progress hobby chess program. The only aspect I am not satisfied with at the moment is the look and feel of the center control panel. Right now this JPanel has BorderLayout, and the Button panel is BorderLayout.NORTH, the JTextField is in its own JPanel that is BorderLayout.South. So you can see the Control area involves three JPanels

Anyways, I would welcome any suggestions on giving the center control area a more professional look and feel. Visual design is not my strength, and I don’t have a lot of time to spend on the topic right now.

You can try the game if you want, it is weak on strategy but pretty good with tactics if you give it the chance. Make the first move and click start if you want to play white, else just click start if you want to play black.

http://fchess.uuuq.com/fchess2/fchess2.htm

#2

Cool chess game! Working out the AI must have been interesting.

You should take a look at the substance api here: https://substance.dev.java.net/

It’s got the best high-contrast game-y look and feels. I like the RavenGraphiteGlass skin the best.

#3

Thanks, yeah the program is a lot of fun. In one sense I’m just getting started with putting my own stamp on things, algorithms for game tree traversal, such as negamax and alphabeta, are well documented and widely used, it’s just a matter of applying the pseudo-code. That part is more or less independant of the type of game being played. The real challenge comes now, with figuring out ways to impart “chess knowledge” to the program. In that respect I have only scratched the surface.

anyways, I’ll check out the substance API, and post a new link when I get things fixed up.

#4

To improve look and feel, you can always use Swing but replace all your borders. It looks pretty nice.

http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php/topic,12219.0.html