I'm making a game where you start by drawing your map. At the moment it works by having an Area instance variable and then when the player clicks/drags the mouse it adds Ellipse2Ds to it. Here's what I mean:
Area land = new Area();
And then in the MouseDragged method
Point2D mouse = e.getPoint();
Ellipse2D ter = new Ellipse2D.Double(mouse.getX() - drawRad, mouse.getY() - drawRad, drawRad*2, drawRad*2);
land.add(new Area(ter));
And then basically the same except land.subtract(new Area(ter)) for erasing.
My problem with this is that after doing a lot of drawing it becomes very slow to draw the Area. the other problem is that I would like to be able to easily get the outline of the drawing, and I haven't found a good way of doing that using Areas. Using area.getPathIterator is not nearly accurate enough.
So I'm wondering what other ways of saving drawings are? I can't just have an array of Ellipses because then erasing wouldn't work.
Thanks!
If you are drawing the same thing over and over it may be worth while to draw it to an image once or load it from a file at start up and then just paint the image rather than painting all the individual shapes.
To load from a file, put your picture file in the same directory as your .java file and load:
BufferedImage img = ImageIO.read(this.getClass().getResource("picture.png"));
To draw on the image once:
BufferedImage img = new BufferedImage(width,height, BufferedImage.TYPE_4BYTE_ABGR);
Graphics2D g = img.createGraphics();
In your paintComponent method you draw the image somewhere.
g.drawImage(img, 0, 0, this);
If you have something moving over a background, instead of adding and subtracting the moving item. Just draw the background and then draw the thing that moves, drawing the background will effectively erase the old position with less computation.