Can't get the keys to run anything...

Question

Yeah, so I've literally spent the past two days trying to figure out how to get the keys to make stuff move in my game. I've already gotten the computer players to move around, implemented a collision detection system of sorts, and written the methods that will facilitate movement in the main person when called.
Here's my problem. I've been looking at several tutorials, and I see two primary ways of doing this. One, key binding, which I've been persuing more heavily, apparently requires use of a component. As of yesterday I didn't know what a component was, and since I've discovered that this method, in fact, requires an object that is a JComponent, which I don' t have in my program (I have a JFrame, but that's just a component). I was considering just slapping some random one in there, but I don't know how to set the key reading thing to do stuff even when the component is not selected. And I also think it would be sort of stupid to put superfluous stuff like that in my program.
The other method had tons of parameters and I really had no idea where they would all come from.
So, any suggestions?

Answer 1

in your main method or whatever put
addKeyListener(myKeyHandler())
// this class has 3 methods in java, keyPressed, keyTyped, keyReleased
myKeyHandler extends KeyAdapter
public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e)
int key = e.getKey//or something like that
if(key == VK.W)
up = true;
repaint();
else if(key == VK.S)
down = true;
repaint();
// if necessecary
try{ Thread.sleep(howeveramount)} catch(Exception f)
paint
if (up == true)
yPosition++
g.draw(thing);
else if(down == true)
yPosition--
g.draw(thing);
Edited by: nik7_7 on Apr 19, 2008 7:07 PM