Window components in tile-based game

Game Play & Game Design
#1

Hi,
I’m building a tile-based game which should have menu/control windows around the edges of the screen, a bit like Baldur’s Gate or Command and Conquer.
The windows need to be scrollable, and display text and html links.
Will my game’s performance be badly hit if I use Swing or AWT (or SWT?) to draw these windows? Would making custom Swing components help? Is there a standard approach to this kind of thing?
Thanks for tips,
Lemmy

PS. Ideally I would like to make the windows collapsible, to reveal more of the game map underneath when they’re minimised.

#2

[quote]PS. Ideally I would like to make the windows collapsible, to reveal more of the game map underneath when they’re minimised.
[/quote]
You’ll have a hard time doing that with Swing/AWT widgets without it looking like crap. In fact you’ll have a hard time using Swing/AWT stuff anywhere in a game and getting it to look good, it breaks the immersion and just screams ‘application’ rather than ‘game’.

You could quite easily contruct some basic GUI widgets yourself to be drawn directly onto your game display, you’re only going to be needing simple controls really.

#3

Well, I misdescribed it, it’s sort of a mixture of an application and a game ;D
Isn’t it possible to make custom Swing components with their own styled look?
I’ll look into building something from scratch - but do you know if using Swing would have an effect on performance?
Thanks,
Lemmy

#4

Even if Swing did not inccur an overhead, you want to use it as minimally as possible. As stated above, its just not good looking for games, even when you customize the Swing component.

Save yourself the agony of trying to make Swing work for a 2D game and write/burrow custom components. They will look a ton nicer and both integrate and work as you expect.