Well, as this is my first entry in the Game Programming section, I think I should link my introductory tutorial. http://www.dreaminco...topic143744.htm

Anyway, this section is dedicated to aspects of several languages that should be taken advantage of. In this entry, I will show you the most basic method of how to establish a frame rate in Java.

Firstly, how to calculate? Say, we want 70 FPS. Since there are 1000 milliseconds in a second, we divide 100 by the frame rate to get the number of milliseconds on each frame. 1000/70 = ~14.28 ms...

Well, that's a little fast, so let's round it up to 15, about 66 FPS. Now, we use the javax.swing.Timer class to call a certain method every specified number of milliseconds. The syntax looks like this: Timer time = new Timer(<number_of_millies>, <handling_method>);. An important note is that it requires an ActionListener, and it calls actionPerformed().

Let's see how to implement it:

class Ball {
	private int x=0, y=0;
	private int xDir=1, yDir=1;
  
	public void move() {
		x += xDir;
		y += yDir;
	}

	public void draw(Graphics g) {
		g.setColor(Color.red);
		g.fillOval(x, y, 5, 5); // x, y, width, height
	}
}

Well, this class represents a ball, obviously incomplete and you can add more functionality.
Now, for the JPanel doing the drawing...

public class BallPanel extends JPanel implements ActionListener {
	private Ball myBall;	 

	public BallPanel() {
		//... set width, height, w/e  
		myBall = new Ball();
		
		// Set up a Timer for 15 milliseconds to call actionListener
		Timer time = new Timer(15, this);
		time.start();
	}
  
	public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
		 // Move the ball
		 myBall.move();
		 repaint();
	}

	// Controls the painting
	public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
		// Paint the background
	g.setColor(Color.darkGray);
	g.fillRect(0, 0, width, height);
		
		// Draw the ball
	myBall.draw(g);		
	
		// makes sure monitors are up to date on *NIX systems
	Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().sync();
	}
}

That's the skeleton code, and obviously, you will need to add the width, height, key listeners, and whatever else you need to make it work fully.

Thanks for reading!
~Stephen Schwahn