Best way to make background

Question

Hey, I have a few questions regarding how to make a background for my game. Since this is the first time ive tried to do this, I dont have much of an idea on what is good and what is bad to do.
What I want to do is create a scrollable, tiled background. My thoughts after reading some on this forum was to create something like a 10x10 grid of JLabels to paint all the various tiles on. It seems a little overkill to use 100 objects to paint. Which brings me to my first question and second qestion:
1. What should i use to paint the pictures on?
2. What does a good size sound like, is 10x10 way too big? 7x7 is a lot less and less than half the size.
I must cut this post short as I must leave for school now, but i have two moer quick questions:
3. Also, what kind of loading for the images should I do to make sure they are pre loaded?
4. What kind of images should i use, .bmp, .gif, .jpg?
Thanks for your help,
WoW

Answer 1

1.What should i use to paint the pictures on?
If you want to use tiles you can simply set this up by creating a buffered image via a graphics object:
          Image = getImage(getDocumentBase(), "test.gif");//there are lots of different TYPE_s look them up
          BufferedImage = new BufferedImage(yourScreenWidth,yourScreenHeight, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
          Graphics = BufferedImage.createGraphics();Then you can draw on the buffered image like this
     Graphics.drawImage(Image,x,y, this);//draw your tiles on here.Then you can draw your final image as normal
        public void paint(Graphics g) //or whatever
               g.drawImage(BufferedImage,x,y, this);
        }2. What does a good size sound like, is 10x10 way too big? 7x7 is a lot less and less than half the size.
16*16, 32*32, 64*64 etc. Standard screen friendly sizes, but it all depends on the size you want your final screensize.
3. Also, what kind of loading for the images should I do to make sure they are pre loaded?
import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
           try
                Image = javax.imageio.ImageIO.read(getClass().getResource("test.gif"));
           catch(java.io.IOException e)
          System.out.println(e);