Thread: Better solution for moving my rectangle? (simple game)

Hi,

I am creating a simple game in Java which currently looks like this:
mv6dg9.jpg
The blue rectangle on the right is moving towards the blue square (the blue square is my hero which I can move around with the arrow keys). If I get hit by the blue rectangle my health gets reduced. What I would like to ask is if there's any better function to move my rectangle than the one I use below:

if(level == 0) {try {
	        while (true) {
	        	skott.x -= skottspeed;
                        Thread.sleep(1 * 100);
		        level = 1;
		}
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
                        e.printStackTrace();
}
}

skott.x decides the x value of the rectangle which moves (also known as skott) towards the hero and here it takes minus speed which is a declared variable further up in my code and level is set to 1. I'm not really sure yet how thread.sleep is used but I think there's a better way moving my rectangle than the way I have done it. I would really appreciate some input since I'm quite new to programming a game.

Thanks,
John Z

I'm not really sure what the question is. Does this work? Where is your SSCCE? What do you mean by "better"?

I would use a Swing Timer instead of threading.

Sounds good to me. And it sounds like you should be using a Swing Timer. Every time the Timer fires (30 seconds a second is a reasonable framerate), just check the location of the rectangle and either move it forward or respawn it.

Originally Posted by JohnZ

Thanks for your help. Gonna give it a try right away. Respawning it I use repaint();?

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Calling repaint() simply tells the component to paint itself using paintComponent(). So you override paintComponent to display a frame of your game.

Then every time the Swing Timer fires, you do something like this:
1- Update every game Object. The OO way to do this is to iterate over each Object and call an update function of each.
2- call repaint

Then in paintComponent(), you simply iterate over each Object and paint it, perhaps by calling each Object's paint function.