Project for school - I encountered some problems

Question

School gave me and my team a assignment to make a simulation of a floor-robot called Robbie. You can see Robbie as a plotter it is a round robot with a pen that it can turn on or off. The simulation should be of a remote control which gives commands to a class called Robbie.
http://yvo.net/forum/Version16.zip
is what our group made so far.
Our problems are:
-> When Robbie moves, he shocks, I think this has something to do with the paint routines of the underlying Frame. (Frame has a container called World which has a lightweight component called Robbie). We used double buffering, it does not flicker, it shocks.
-> Collision Detection, how should we do Collision Detection between a Wall and a Robbie (Wall can be turned 360 degrees, not just horizontal or vertical). The Robbie to Robbie collision detection works, but could be optimized a lot I think.
-> It is too slow, are their ways to speed up the calculations/smarter repaint? (General Optimization, on school it should run pretty smoothly on a 486).
All the information is in the zip-file and all the source-codes. I use JDK1.4 to compile/run. I noticed that JDK1.3 results in bad repainting. It's a package, the MAIN class is hvu.robbie.gui.MainFrame
All suggestions are welcome, thank you,
Yvo van Beek
[email protected]

Answer 1

Hi,
The thread in RobbieControl should have a sleep
period, instead of having it in the RobbieMove method.
Right now its just calling the robbie-methods all the
time. Actually I dont like that thread at all, think u
should have a thread closer to the paintcalling
methods instead, maybe in robbieMove or just in
Robbie.The problem is, forward should be able to be called manually, like forward(100). Then Robbie should just move the 100 steps, but not too quick (that's why we implemented the pause). We implemented the Thread into the Remote Control, so that the user can keep the button pressed and Robbie will keep on moving AND because the method forward has to return the real number of steps it made, in order to do that (with 2 robbies) is to move the robbie trough the process of calling the method forward, then keep him busy with the moving process and then return. We first tried one Thread for the Remote and another one for moving Robbie. But that became complicated because the first Thread had to wait() in forward and awaken the move Thread, and after moving set the move thread to wait() en notify() the remote control Thread. But you can't force a wait() and notify() so that gave problems.
>
U should probably look at ur doublebuffering. Instead
of doublebuffer the whole 'world' just buffer the
components in it. That way u will avoid that
components isnt fully painted when they move. If doing
that, components-double buffering, u need to repaint
the area where the component have moved from. And u
will need to override some update(Graphics g) methods,
in World and in robbie. They should just call paint.
Ive tried it and the rotating looks much better,
though the movement needs some improvement. I think u
maybe need to override setLocation...Could you maybe give me a bit of code or explain it?
I do not understand the process of container => container => component painting... My emailadress is [email protected] (there you can send source of post it here)
>
I think the collision-detection should be called in
World.moveObject.We will change that, thank you :)
>
Hope theese comment isnt to vague. I will try find
some old code of mine, and compare it with urs.
Stig.Thank you for your help,
Yvo van Beek