Avoid Common Pitfalls when Programming 2D Graphics in Java
Short summary:
In games with a simple game loop, the input events can be taken from the queue and processed. images are stored in Buffered Image objects. Images can be drawn ...
Long summary:
The programming component of the first year of undergraduate studies at McGill University in
Computer Science heavily focuses on object-oriented programming in Java. Thus, it is not
surprising that students often choose this language when developing large-scale projects during
their latter school years. These projects sometimes include game development, such as the one in
the course COMP-361 Systems Development Project, a mandatory course for software engineering
majors.
Java provides two frameworks for designing graphical user interfaces: AWT and Swing. AWT is
mostly use for applet development; its components are considered light-weight. Swing components
are more flexible, offer a wider variety of features and are more actively supported, but tend to
render slower. When developing Java games, it is best to avoid both frameworks, since both
frameworks are extremely slow and ill suited for game development.
The Minueto game development framework
1
was developed to help the COMP-361 students
complete their game development project. Before its introduction, many students struggled to get
adequate performance from their Java game. Minueto hides many of the Java-specific knowledge
required to get good 2D performance, and hence students can focus on the design and
implementation of the game functionality.
It took over 8 months to create the Minueto framework. A tremendous amount of work was spent
into optimizing the drawing engine, hiding tricky implementation details behind an elegant and
simple API. This article presents the Java 2D knowledge that was acquired during the development
of this tool. It also presents the pitfalls commonly encountered by Java 2D programmers.
1.1 Basic Building Blocks
There are 2 basic building blocks for graphics in a 2D game, a drawing canvas and a collection of
images. The canvas is either displayed on the screen as one or several windows, or takes up the
entire screen. Images are the blocks that get drawn on the canvas. These images are drawn
repetitively on the screen to produce animation.
In Java, the canvas is either a Frame or a JFrame object. The images are stored in BufferedImage
objects. Images can be drawn on the canvas or over other images through the use of a Graphics2D
object. The following sections explain how to properly build your canvas (section 2), your images
(section 3) and what other optimizations to consider (section 4) to ensure optimal Java 2D graphics
performance.
Source: www.acm.org
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