"Starcraft" like 2D game ?

Java 2D
#1

Hi,

first, please excuse me if this has been answered elsewhere, but I haven’t had much luck finding anything.

I’m trying to tinker together a game engine that has functionality such as games like StarCraft or SimCity. I definitly do not want any 3D junk, and I don’t want to make it have an openGL requirement either. I tried making a Swing frame (I’d like the framework to be swing-like for things such as interface and menus), and draw the 2D display myself with buffered images by overriding the paint method of a JFrame. However, that appears to be incredibly slow, down to maybe 5 frames per second, which is a problem when I have moving things.

Anyone got a suggestion ? I don’t mind reading up some, but as said, I have yet to find a project or a tutorial that does anything like what I want. Most things are either openGL or incredibly primitive pong-like-games.

#2

Now the standard question: do you create your images using the createCompatibleImage method of a GraphicsConfiguration object? If not, this might increase performance considerably.

Do you apply any transformations to your images?

Provide more information about your rendering procedure.

#3

Thats really minor details which I’m willing to work out on my own, the question was more if doing it like this (overriding the paint method of a JLabel and working with the graphics object) was the proper way to do it or if there are other, better ways.

#4

1.) Don’t use “passive” rendering, instead use BufferStrategy and paint directly to that.
2.) Use java-1.5 (or higher) + transparent only images if you want to get hw-accalerated BufferedImages. Transulescent images (half-transparent) are only accalerated with OpenGL or D3D backends. (or some unsupported switches).

What you would like to archive should be definitivly doable with todays standard hardware and java.

Good luck, lg Clemens