Problem with animation and separate CPU intensive thread.

Question

Hi All,
I'm in the process of writing a Java chess game with a computer AI. I've got everything working except for the animation of the computer making its move. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt.
Here's the problem:
After the computer has finished deciding what move to make (CPU intensive - using standard Minimax w/ Alpha Beta pruning), the thread terminates passing the move to the animation thread (implemented using javax.swing.Timer). My delay is set to 50. But the multiple calls to repaint() in the Timer thread all get collapsed into one (they somehow get bunched up) causing a major display glitch!
Sometimes this happens, sometimes it doesnt. I wanted to know if i could write some kind of wait function to wait until the CPU is free to process quick repaint() requests so that my animation can look descent all the time.
Thanks for any help.
jairam at ecf dot utoronto dot ca

Answer 1

In the javax.swing.Timer class is a method called
setCoalesque(boolean) (I think I spelled that wrong, but you will find it)
By default the Timer class does exacltly what you mentioned, it merges multiple events into one when the application is too busy. Call setCoalesque(false) to receive all the events from the Timer.