Thread: Can you think of a better way to do this? (I'm desperate!)

I have read your post over again and still do not quite understand what you are doing. Can you explain more, perhaps more about the flow, what is going on and what pictures are changing.
Do you need 14 pictures? If so use them. If you are using completely new pictures to draw a border around the old picture, then you have too many pictures. If they are very different images, then it would seem they are individually necessary to get the desired display.
If I understand correctly, on the part about the mouse listener being used to detect button clicks by determining position, you can draw an image and draw buttons over top of that image that still work as buttons, detect being clicked and messaging registered action listeners. Perhaps drawing buttons on different backgrounds would solve some of the multiple image issues.

Then again I am not quite sure I understand what is going on in the code from the description. Perhaps post some of the code used for the images and such, (the stuff that makes you say its getting complex), perhaps the code can shed some light

Hi, Ill try to explain what I'm doing and how I'm doing it better. And sorry if posting my .jar is not allowed (if thats why the link was removed). I'm not very good at explaining things...

My program gives information on the physics behind various subjects. I have it divided into three sections, Big, Small, and everything in between. Each of these sections has sub sections, for example as you see in the picture, Big has sub sections Universe, Galaxy, Stars, Future Tech, etc. The three main sections are in the middle, and when you click them, the corresponding sub sections appear on the side panels. Lets say you click the "Galaxy" button. The center panel changes to an interface with more buttons to pages about various things about galaxies.

When you click a button, it becomes Bright, signifying it is the button that is active.

now in terms of the actual code, I'll try to explain whats happening. For the main menu, I have three buttons: big, between, and small. I use an image for each button being pressed (See picture below)

MainMenu2.jpg

I am no longer using a mouselistener to find out where the user clicked like I was when I wrote this. Now, I have invisible JButtons on the Positions the buttons are on the screen.

Now with the side panels: I have multiple sets of buttons for each of the sections big, between and small. For big, the buttons may be "universe" "galaxy" stars, but for small they buttons on the side panels may be "electrostatics" "chemical reactions" "Light". So I have buttons that go to different pages, but they are all in the same positions as each other. So to work with this, I have an integer variable called State, which ranges from 1 - 46 depending on what set of buttons are displayed on the screen. When a button is clicked, I use a switch statement to determine the state, and if lets say the state = 5, then the button that was in the range of the mouse click was "Universe". If the state was 7, the button that was clicked was "Electrostatics".

So in the end of all this, I have over 120 images, each for the different combinations of buttons being clicked (like in the picture above). I hope this makes it easier to understand.

Thanks

I would use a common background image and let buttons draw themselves (differently depending on their own state, selected or not etc) on top of the (same) background. (instead of multiple large images and invisible buttons)

Then an organized filtering should remove the need for 46 different states. I get the feeling a few states and a couple of buttons would take care of it.

What would I do with such a program as the end user? What would I expect? Is this like a slide show of facts with images? I don't quite understand how it is intended to be used, I am just wondering if this time is being spent "fine-tuning" a "bad-approach" so to speak

It's just a project for physics class, where we need to demonstrate the physics involved in various things. We had present this information in a "special" form, so i chose to do this. It's kind of like a powerpoint I guess, but with multiple "routes" instead of just going to the next slide everytime. It just displays information, videos, equations, etc.

Lots of the time was being spent trying to figure out which switch statement was for what, what variable was for what, what icon[] index was what image, etc. But you just made it a lot more simpler!

I never thought of just painting the buttons onto the screen... thats really the "common sense" thing to do i guess, but it never even occurred to me. You and the person who suggested I use invisible buttons helped me so much. Thank you so much!