Updating paint methods

Question

Hi all,
I was wondering if you can help,
I am programming a java game applet and have got a large picture placed directly onto the applet, which is updated with an animation thread.
This doesn't look right and I want to put the picture in a JPanel so that I can arrange my GUI better.
The usual way seems to be to extend a JPanel in a inner class and use its paintComponent method, but I'm not sure how to convert the code I have at the moment to do this. Especially using the drawImage method I use currently (see below).
public void paint(Graphics g){
     offScreen.drawImage(bgimage, 0, 0, this);
        offScreen.drawImage(fgimage, 0, 0, this);       
        colony.paint(offScreen);                                    
        g.drawImage(image, 0, 0, imageViewWidth, imageViewHeight,imageViewX_tc, imageViewY_tc, imageViewX_bc, imageViewY_bc, this);
} Any help would be appreciated,
John

Answer 1

I don't suggest you use a JPanel for animation, because it is swing, and swing is not thread-safe. Which means you have to use the much slower javax.swing.Timer rather than java.lang.Thread. However, I'll still convert your code in case you still want to do it:
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
     super.paintComponent(g);
     offScreen.drawImage(bgimage,0,0,this);
     offScreen.drawImage(fgimage,0,0,this);
     colony.paint(offScreen);
     g.drawImage(image, 0, 0, imageViewWidth, imageViewHeight,imageViewX_tc, imageViewY_tc, imageViewX_bc, imageViewY_bc, this);
}You should really decide to use an AWT component for your animation, like Panel (or event better- Canvas), because you can use the much faster Thread. So try using Canvas, you can still add it to your GUI because it's a child class of Component.