Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Your InvinciBagel game application is already using this
ActionEvent
class (ob-
ject), with the
EventHandler interface
and its
.handle()
method, which you code
yourself to tell your application what to do to “handle” the Event (ActionEvent) once it
has occurred (fired). The .handle() method
catches
this
fired
event and then processes
it, according to the Java programming logic inside the body of the .handle() method.
A Java
interface
is a class that furnishes
empty
methods, which are declared for
use but which do not yet contain any Java programming constructs. The
unimplemen-
ted methods
will, at the time of their use, have to be implemented by you, the Java
programmer. This Java interface defines only the methods to be implemented (in this
case, a method for handling the ActionEvent so that the event gets processed in some
fashion). It is important to note that the Java interface defines the method that needs to
be coded but does not write the method code for you, so it is a road map of what you
must do to complete, or
interface with
, the programming structure that is in place (in
this case, the Java programming structure for handling ActionEvent objects, that is,
fired action events.
Now, let's take a look at
multithreading
in JavaFX, which is another important
concept for advanced games, to conclude this exploration of everything 2D- and 3D-
(game) related in the JavaFX API and package hierarchy.
JavaFX Thread Control for Games: javafx.concurrent
Package
Games require
background
, or
asynchronous
, processing. This can be done using ad-
ditional threads besides the JavaFX application thread, Prism rendering thread, and me-
dia playback thread, which are all automatically created for you, based on which
classes (objects) you are using in your scene graph. Your application programming lo-
gic can spawn its own Worker threads for processing so that you do not overload the
primary JavaFX application thread. Let's take a look at the
javafx.concurrent
package
next, as it provides us with the
Service
superclass and its
ScheduledService
subclass,
for creating
Worker
objects, as well as a
Task
class, used for one-off task processing.
Because you are going to be using Service and ScheduledService in your JavaFX
games (applications), I am demonstrating the ScheduledService class inheritance hier-
archy here, as this will show you the java.lang.Object origins of the Service classes as
well:
