Sprites, BufferedImage and drawing question

Java 2D
#1

Hello all!! I am sort of new at this forum, and generally to java game development. Of course, I already have my first set of questions ready". :wink:

First of all, I have an image file containing the a character’s sprite, with its various frames for animation and such. So, how is the best way to represent and manipulate a sprite in Java. Should I create a single BufferedImage and get subimages of the various frames in rendering time or should I create a BufferedImage for each sprite’s frame?? Which method is fastest and, possibly, hardware accelerated??

Also, my rendering method consists of drawing several BufferedImages to a VolatileImage and drawing this VolatileImage into a BufferStrategy?? It this too much overhead?? Is there a way to do it better?

By the way, is it possible to create a simple 2D game (such as a plataform game) which runs generally well on older PCs, like a Pentium III 500Mhz, or something like that?? ;D

Thanks in advance,
Moon Pxi

#2

Sub images of one big BufferedImage was always slower than multiple seperate images whenever I tried it, I assume because smaller images can be cached in vRam better. Loading time is much faster with one image though, so loading and chopping up at runtime was the best I found.

Also try removing the volatileImage->bufferStratergy and just draw direct to the bufferStratergy, it’ll be using a volatile image as a backbuffer anyway (or should be at any rate).