Chess Piece display problem in applet

Question

Hi,
I'm writing a chess game applet which will be played between to players over the internet. I'm currently working on the applet side at the moment and will develop the server side once I have completed the applet. I'm currently having problems displaying the actual chess pieces on the board at the moment. One of my design decisions was to make a Board class which extends a JPanel. I have painted the actual chess board squares within the Board JPanel. I then propose to draw the pieces on top of these squares (good design decsion? Can anyone suggest another way. I was thinking of having the images as a separate layer which will sit on top of the squares but wasn't sure how to implement it). The chess pieces are contained in a gif strip www.dur.ac.uk/j.d.p.murphy called ChessPieces02.gif . The problem I am having is to display several pieces at the same time. I lloked at a Java tutorial which suggested using g.clipRect() method to display a defined section of the strip (i.e. a single piece of a certain length). Below is the Board class that I am using.
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class Board extends JPanel{
// Holds location of the mousePressed event
Point point = null;
// Size of a square square on the board
int square_size = 40;
// Mediatracker to monitor the loading of the images
MediaTracker tracker;
Image image;
void init() {
tracker = new MediaTracker(this);
image = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage("ChessPieces02.gif");
tracker.addImage(image, 0);
try {
//Start downloading the images. Wait until they're loaded.
tracker.waitForAll();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
throw new Error("error");
if (tracker.isErrorAny()) {
throw new Error("Could not load image");
addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter() {
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) {
if (point == null)
point = new Point(0, 0);
int x = e.getX();
int y = e.getY();
System.out.println("X co-ord: " + x + " Y co-ord: " + y);
// Floor the x and y values to the nearest unit of 25
x = x - x % square_size;
y = y - y % square_size;
point.setLocation(x, y);
repaint();
System.out.println(point);
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
super.paintComponent(g); //paint background
System.out.println("Chess Board Paint");
// Loop to produce the black and white squares to represent the board
for(int jj = 0; jj < 8; jj ++){
for(int ii = 0; ii < 8; ii++){
if(ii % 2 == jj % 2)
g.setColor(Color.white);
else
g.setColor(Color.lightGray);
g.fillRect(ii * square_size, jj * square_size, square_size, square_size );
// Draw a highlighted square
if (point != null){
g.setColor(Color.green);
g.fillRect( (int)point.getX(), (int)point.getY(), square_size, square_size);
//imageStrip is the Image object representing the image strip.
//imageWidth is the size of an individual image in the strip.
//imageNumber is the number (from 0 to numImages)
// of the image to paint.
int stripWidth = image.getWidth(this);
int stripHeight = image.getHeight(this);
int imageWidth = stripWidth / 6;
System.out.println("Width = " + imageWidth);
g.clipRect(120, 0, imageWidth, stripHeight / 2);
g.drawImage(image, 0 * imageWidth, 0, this);
What code do i need to add more pieces to the board? I plan to make a ChessPiece array (8x8) which will holld all the chess pieces on the board. Should I hold this array in the board class to make drawing the pieces easier? Any other tips for game development would also be most welcome.
Thanks

Answer 1

cross post, I think.
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp?thread=496287&forum=406