What about creating a Slider interface as a counterpart of ListIterator

Question

I am currently working on a student project of a game. I have took this opportunity to play more with programming, algorithms and design. That is where my curiosity is coming from.
I want to add a feature, which would allow to accelarate and slow down the pace, at which time in the game pases. From the alogirithmical point of view I need a list structure containing all posible ratios (ranging from close to 0 to far behind 1) with a default value initially set to 1. I thought I would use ListIterator<Double> interface. However it has some quirks. First when I am moving to the right and at one point I decide to move to the left I will have to know to invoke previous() method twice. Second it has completely unnecessary methods concerned with indexes.
My question is: are there any interface and maybe some additional (could be abstract) classes better suited for a task of this kind in the wild?
Thank you,
With regards,
Bartek

Answer 1

The base for my UI is a self made text-based screen embeded in a simple GUI made with Swing.
Here is a brief description of how everything works:
The screen shows text picture. Text picture is just a simple 2 dimensional matrix, which values are characters. To represent it I wrote the following interface:
public interface Picture extends TimeUpdatable {
     public int getWidth();
     public int getHeight();
     public char getPoint(int x, int y);
*Updates its state after the given <tt>amountOfTime</tt> has elapsed since last update.*
*@param amountOfTime*
     public void update(long amountOfTime);
     public boolean setScreenMode(boolean screenMode);
     public void init();
     public boolean isInitialized();
     public static class InitializedStatus {
          private boolean state = false;
          public boolean isInitialized() {
               return state;
          public void setInitialized() {
               state = true;
}I have written also two important abstract classes to allow for easy generation of more sophisticated pictures. Just for an example you can build a picture from other premade pictures by putting them on a canvas one at a time. The final picture generated by the actual application is rendered by a dedicated module (also self made) on the screen component on my Swing GUI. I made a class Updater solely responsible for refreshing the state of the game and for refreshing its picture on the screen via the aforementioned dedicated module. The game state is being refreshed in regular, frequent intervals.
End of description.
As you can see I did not mean any Swing/AWT GUI component. In truth I don't need ANY visual component at all. The relative speed of the game would be adjusted with keyboard and there would only be (but not necessarily) a status window (confirming a change) shown on top for a few seconds.
What I definitely need is a data structure, which I could utilize to build this and any other similar functionality. I have already implemented this functionality with the Slider interface I have already shown in this thread. The only think is, that it would be wise to use a similar interface, if it existed already in the standard API or some other API widely acclaimed in the developers' community. It's not good to reinvent the wheel.
If you still don't get my intentions maybe this [screenshot of the game|http://picasaweb.google.com/bartek.krzywania ChessTextModeGame#5371365518732532946] will be helpful. It shows the settings page. Unfortunately it's in polish only by now (though this should not matter at this point). In the foreground you can see a simple notice massage about a game speed change, which set to hover there for 2 secs.
I hope I made my ideas reasonably clear in this post.
With regards,
Bartek
Edited by: Bartek-Krzywania on 2009-08-18 20:05