Java in-game components

Question

I have always wanted to create a game in java but I will not use Swing components for obvious reasons. Thus I have decided to create my own in-game components. Many will be simple like buttons, checkboxes and so on. I have some questions before starting that hopefully somebody can help me with. Does it make sense to create panel/container components or layout managers? The reason I ask is because the components will only be in-game, does it make sense for all the components to be positioned on an x-y grid and nothing else? What about updating the GUI, would you recommend that active rendering should update all the components or should it repaint the components whenever necessary like AWT/Swing does? Also if anybody has done this kind of thing before, I would like to know what you have done if at all possible. I appreciate any sort of help, thank you.

Answer 1

Well, I did "reinvent the wheel", for two reasons : the fullscreen mode did not support awt components when I first tried to use it and I hate round looking buttons which turn out to be rectangular when you click them. You can find the gme and the source code for which I created my library here (still a lot to do but hotseat games work. The source code is contained in the download. the graphics library is in the subdirectory mk/graphics) :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bloodbowlleague/
In this library, nothing has to be rectangular, especially buttons. If you want an animated sprite to be a button, no problem, just assign the sprite to one ore more button states of the button it represents (so it works a bit like swing I guess). I used containers, for several reasons. Most importantly, it is a good way to group displayed objects and to change the state of whole groups. The container class can easily be extended to a popup menu class or something similar. But my containers are not rectangular either. They don't even have an area. Since I didn't need moving objects to interact with the mouse yet, I use a different mechanism for containers : every time the mouse moves, the container sets a "contains" flag for every object it contains (some of the "contains()" methods of my objects take some time to execute, and I don't want to redo all checks for every frame). Only these objects will receive events, display tooltips and determine how the mouse gets displayed. If I wanted to add moving buttons, I'd add an interface between the container and the class that handles the animation, and every time an object moves, the animation class will tell the container about it so the container can recheck the state for this single object.
Another thing I used where generic constructors for nearly all display objects. Every parameter is either an object or is encapsuled in some wrapper class. It is possible to set default objects for the constructors and to use displayed objects as parameters for the constructors. This way it is possible to generate similar objects with a minimum of parameters, namely only the original object (if any) and the parameters you want to change and you can give them in any order you want (unless one parameter would undo the changes made by previous parameters and you don't want that, of course).
Well, I hope at least the stuff about containers was helpful. Have a look at the library, especially the classes XComponent, XImage and XContainer, if you want to see how I did things.