Have you ever wanted to create your own 3D game but didn’t know where to start? In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of making your own launcher for a Java-based 3D game, so you can get one step closer to bringing your game ideas to life.
Contents
To start off, we need to create a launcher for our game. In the previous episode, we created a launcher with buttons that didn’t work. Now, we’re going to make those buttons functional. But before we do that, let’s move the launcher to a new package called “GUI” to keep our code organized.
Now, let’s focus on adding functionality to the “Play” button. We will add an action listener to the button, which will perform a specific action when the button is clicked. In our case, we want to print a line that says “Play”.
play.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
System.out.println("Play");
}
});Similarly, we can add action listeners to the other buttons for “Options”, “Help”, and “Quit” as well. For now, let’s just print a line for each button to verify that they are working.
Extending the Launcher
Now, let’s extend our launcher to create a new class called “Options”. This class will be responsible for displaying a window with additional options for our game. We will add a dropdown menu to select the game resolution as an example option.
To create the dropdown menu, we’ll use the “Choice” class in Java. We’ll add different resolution options to the dropdown menu, such as 640×480, 1024×768, and 800×600.
Next, we’ll set the default selected resolution and create two methods, “getGameWidth” and “getGameHeight”, to return the selected resolution’s width and height values.
Updating the Game Resolution
To update the game resolution based on the selected option, we’ll need to modify the “runGame” method in the game code. We’ll use the “getGameWidth” and “getGameHeight” methods from the “Options” class to set the game resolution before launching it.
Next Steps: Save User Preferences and Help Section
In the next episode, we’ll add functionality to save the user’s selected resolution preference. This way, the game will remember the chosen resolution each time it is launched.
We’ll also add a help section to provide users with information and instructions on how to play the game.
Stay tuned for more exciting episodes, and don’t forget to hit the like button if you found this guide helpful!
