Provide A Scrolling "Camera" View Over A 2D Game Map
- by BitCrash
I'm in the process of attempting to create a 2D MMO type game with Kryonet and some basic sprites, mostly for my own learning. I have the back end set up great (By my standards) and I'm moving on to actually getting some things drawn onto the map.
I cannot for the life of me figure out a solid way to have a "Camera" follow a player around a large area. The view pane for the game is 640 x 480 pixels, and each tile is 32x32 pixels (Thats 20 tiles wide and 15 high for the viewpane)
I have tried a couple things to do this, but they did not seem to work out so well. I had a JScrollPane with 9 "Viewpane"-sized canvases in it, and tried to have the JScrollPane move in accordance with the player. The issue came when I reached the end of the JScrollPane. I tried to "Flip" canvases, sending the canvas currrently drawing the player to the middle of the 9 and load the corresponding maps onto the other ones. It was slow and worked poorly.
I'm looking for any advice or previous experience with this; any ideas?
Thank you!
Edit and Clarification:
I did not mean to mention Kryonet, I was merely providing peripheral information in case there was something that would help which I could not foresee.
Instead of having an array of 9 canvases, why not just have one large canvas loading a large map every once in a while? I'm willing to have "load times" where as with the canvas array I would have none (in theory) to give the user a smooth experience.
I could just change the size and location of the map with a modified setBounds() call on the canvas in a layered pane (layered because I have hidden swing items, like inventories and stuff)
I'll try it out and post here how it goes for people asking the same question.
