Hi, my name is Jonno.

I’ve been self-teaching Java for a few months now, after a few years of self-teaching code in one language or another,  and I have decided to use LD21 as a good bit of motivation to push myself into simple game development in the language. I’ve had a passion for gaming since I was young and have always had a back-of-the-mind plan to write games.

I’ve come to the point where I can write applications in Java with confidence, implementing drawing methods and the Swing API to create a good event-driven GUI app.

My only problem right now is animation and timed events (like game loops, for example). I have read that in Java, Swing Timers do not work so well on Microsoft’s Windows Operating Systems…so I was wondering what other methods are available for gaming. I have a small example application that uses a method to define the game loop, which performs all the actions that would normally happen with a timer tick, but it’s not very clear in its implementation and I’ve so far failed to replicate its function.

So, can anyone help me out?

As a side-note, if I’m not supposed to be posting anything at this time (seeing as there’s no category for LD21 yet), I apologise.

– Jonno