Hello, I''m currently working on a small tile-based java game. At the moment, when I load up a map the tiles slowly scroll on screen. I was wondering if it was actually possible to load them up in the background whilst a graphical load window appears with a status bar and when it''s done, the map pops up? Thanks. Smoo

I THINK that that was the whole idea of the ImageProducer/ImageConsumer classes: to ''observe'' the loading of the images. Also you might want to check that you''ve loaded all your images first and then store them in memory so you won''t have to load them again (involves network connections and Internet latency for some).

Not to sure about the progress bar. Check out sun's tutorial on JFC/Swing and look for the JProgressBar component. As for waiting untill the graphics load, you can use a mediaTracker. Make a function called loadImages(). make a new MediaTracker and give it an instance of your program. Then start loading your images, player = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit.getImage("player.jpg"); then do mt.addImage(player,0); for all your images. And lastly, try mt.waitForAll and catch an interrupted exception. Now all execution will be on hold untill the images are loaded.

Edited by - Jim_Ross on 1/30/00 11:16:38 PM

Of course you would need an additional thread if you want to do something fancy while loading...

(And the progress-bar code is not exactly rocket science - unless you are already using Swing, I''d recommend writing your own instead - downloading several Megs of UI library to get a progress bar is a bit crazy)

Wtf? Downloading swing? I have everything in my JDK 1.2.2 and I don''t need to download enything/every swing component! So does it mean that I *might* not have a progress bar? (I haven''t tried?)

Archon, you have JProgressBar i''m sure.

You are not the problem - people trying to use your applet in a standard browser are! (They don''t have JDK1.2.2 by default)

/Nj

I didn''t know applets were involved at all. Speaking of applets, did you hear about the latest security hole in Microsoft''s VM?

Oh, sorry! Dumb asumption on my part!

Nope, not heard of any new issues in IE... I found a small one a short time ago though: If you have two applets on the same page, one of which has the "mayscript" tag set, these applets SHOULD be given different VM''s (if they don''t, the applet without the "mayscript" tag will be able to execute scripts through the other applet). IE runs both in the same VM...

/Niels

Niels, that is not a security hole, that is the way it "should" be.

All browser use the same JVM to run applets in the same HTML page. Actually that gives you a nice way to communicate between two applets in one HTML page.

JavaWorld had an article last year describing how you should define class (=static) variables if there are going to be several insances of the class in applets that share a webpage.