Need some advice in creating my game the right way.

Game Play & Game Design
#1

Hey all
Currently I’m a little stuck on how to create my game the right way. I been searching a solution for most of today, and not really finding anything I want.
So currently I have a game that uses a JFrame which I use for the Gui (buttons, chat window, etc) then I have a JPanel for the game window itself. Problem though using a JPanel I don’t have BufferStrategy, I created my own basic one but it uses twice the cpu and full screen mode isn’t working well, instead of using canvas. I was using canvas at first but that’s heavy weight and my internal frames weren’t showing on top(which are private message windows). Oh and the reason I don’t render the game on the JFrame is because of deadlocks with the textboxes.

I would like some suggests on the better way of building this. Because I couldn’t find anything on google with a example that could help me.
If you want to have a look at my code and improve it that way, I’ll post what ever is needed.

Edit: Moved post to here.

#2

You can look at this discussion:
http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=15140.15

#3

Before doing anything the right way, I’d advice you to just do it your way.

  1. Get it working
  2. Get it fast

Just try to get some interactive elements in your game. No matter how ineffictient you’ve written it, it will work and wou probably won’t even notice the bad performance as there is not enough happening ingame at once.

#4

Thanks so much, a lot goes over my head atm but I will have to study it.
Riven for to get it working I need to do this. I want to support full screen and I want to support internal frames and I don’t want to create my own textboxs, buttons, etc heh.

#5

Chapter5 on http://www.brackeen.com/javagamebook/#download includes a full screen game,
think you might be interested in the ScreenManager.

good luck with your game

#6

This is just making my game more advance when it doesn’t need too, both idea’s were nice but I had horrible flickering. So I think I’ll go back to canvas and for my private messages, open them outside the game canvas and don’t let them move over the the canvas or support pm’s as a tab on the chat.
I wish there was a lightweight canvas though, would make things a lot more simple…
Anyway thanks for the help. Once I’m finished I’ll gladly show off my game client. I think I done fairly well for my first game.