Java Swing Animation without Thread.sleep

Question

I'm currently making a game where I want to animate the piece being dropped on the board, but cannot use Thread.sleep() as it will interrupt the game. How can I do something like the code below so that it pauses for a certain amount of time between painting the oval again a bit further down.

        for(int counter = 0 ; counter < getMouseX(); counter++) {
            g.fillOval(x*70+10, y, 50, 50);

            //code to wait for 'x' seconds here

        }

Also, is there any way I could disable mouse clicks while this process is going on?

Answer 1

One way to do this would be to use a Swing Timer. Set the Timer to fire X timers per second, then perform your animation there.

It might look something like this:

final Timer t = new Timer(10, new ActionListener(){
   public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){
      //do your updating of your variables here
      repaint();
      counter++;
      if(counter >= mouseX){
         t.stop();
      }
   }
});

t.start();

More info can be found in the Timer tutorial here . You also might consider googling something like "java swing animation".