Timing Animation Events

Question

I'm making an applet game, and I want to be able to time certain events , specified at my interval. .
Thread blah = new Thread();
try {blah.sleep(time);} catch (InterruptedException ex) {}^ doesn't work, because when this new thread is paused for x amount of time, the main thread in the applet pauses as well. Therefore, when the gun overheats, the plane, the enemy, the GAME stops animating completely.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Your thread blah is never started. sleep is a static method of Thread and it pauses the current thread and not another one.
You could create a thread and start it and call Thread.sleep() from within the run method of that thread or you could use a javax.swing.Timer and add an ActionListener to it.
Of course that doesn't give you very accurate timing. Depending on the OS it is only accurate to a few ms. or even more then 10ms.
under Windows it's usually more then 10ms which means it is not the best way to time an animation but for normal applications it has to suffice. Although I wonder how media player applications handle this. Maybe there is something in the WinAPI for that.
Games often don't pause their rendering thread at all but let it run an infinite loop and measure the elapsed time. In Java that could be done with System.nanoTime(). That would give you very precise timing but it would also use up 100% of the CPU.