Chapter 4.  Full-Screen Worms

Chapter 4. Full-Screen Worms A popular aim for games is to be an immersive experience, where the player becomes so enthralled with the game that he or she forgets everyday trivia such as eating and visiting the bathroom. One simple way of encouraging immersion is to make the game window the size of the desktop; a full-screen display hides tiresome text editors, spreadsheets, or database applications requiring urgent attention. I'll look at three approaches to creating full-screen games: An almost full-screen JFrame (I'll call this AFS) An undecorated full-screen JFrame (UFS) Full-screen exclusive mode (FSEM) FSEM is getting a lot of attention since its introduction in J2SE 1.4 because it has increased frame rates over traditional gaming approaches using repaint events and paintComponent( ). However, comparisons between AFS, UFS, and FSEM show their maximum frame rates to be similar. This is due to my use of the animation loop developed in Chapter 2, with its active rendering and high-resolution Java 3D timer. You should read Chapter 2 before continuing. The examples in this chapter will continue using the WormChase game, first introduced in Chapter 3, so you'd better read that chapter as well. By sticking to a single game throughout this chapter, the timing comparisons more accurately reflect differences in the animation code rather than in the game-specific parts. The objective is to produce 80 to 85 FPS, which is near the limit of a typical graphics card's rendering capacity. If the game's frame rate falls short of this, then the updates per second (UPS) should still stay close to 80 to 85, causing the game to run quickly but without every update being rendered.