Fast 3D-ish graphics

Question

hi. i have a program somewhat similar to a pinball or arkanoid game (you can check it out at http://web.mit.edu/dum_dani/www/gizmoball.html ), and i need to paint its "objects" (balls, square/circular/triangular bumpers, flippers & paddles) in a 3D-ish way. right now i'm doing this by using GradientPaint, but it's very slow (for some board configurations the paiting takes ~100ms, which forces me to have an animation at <10fps (which sucks)). i tried to keep an Image object for every board "object" (ball, paddle, etc.), and use Graphics2D.drawImage(...) method to paint them on the board. apparently, this is even slower. any suggestions how to improve the performance, but still keep the 3D-ish look? i'd like to keep the GradientPaint style, but any other (fast) way of giving the objects a 3D look will be appreciated. thanks.

Answer 1

I don't know why the if block would be running faster than the draw. In my experience, creating the new BufferedImage is what takes the longest, but after that, painting them, especially if they are small, takes fairly little time. Also, by using a few images for dynamic objects, flashing is greatly reduced without using costly double buffering of the entire game board.
One thing I noticed, and I don't know how or if it affects performance, you should probably use getGraphics instead of createGraphics when using the image. And when you use createGraphics, you should call dispose on them when you are done using them.
As for repainting areas around moving objects, I think it would be worth the effort, especially if you want to do more development like this. If you only have to repaint a few small rectangles instead of the entire screen every time, that speeds up drawing a lot. To get it to work, try having objects call a bounded refresh method on the board using the bounding boxes of their old and new positions. It also means taking out a global repaint in the run method of the thread controlling the game.