[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 13 ■ Animating Your Action Figure States: Setting the Image States Based on KeyEvent Processing
Figure 13-8. Add int variables at top of the class for framecounter and runningspeed and set to zero in no movement if
As you can see in Figure 13-8, I’ve clicked on the framecounter variable, so it is highlighted, and you can see its
use in an initialization statement that we’ll need to put into the “no arrow keys pressed” conditional if() structure, just
as we did with the animator variable. The code for this if() structure is shown in Figure 13-8, and looks like this:
if( !invinciBagel.isRight() &&
!invinciBagel.isLeft() &&
!invinciBagel.isDown() &&
!invinciBagel.isUp() ) {
spriteFrame.setImage(imageStates.get(0));
animator=false;
framecounter=0;
}
Just like we want the animator Boolean variable to be reset to the false value any time that all of the arrow keys
are not in use, so to do we want the framecounter integer variable to be reset to a zero value, any time that the arrow
keys are not in use (that is, are in a released state all at the same time). As you can see, we not only are setting our
sprite’s waiting image state in this conditional statement, we are also using it to reset our other variables as well.
Now we are ready to make our .isRight() and .isLeft() conditional if structures even more complicated, as we will
be nesting our Java logic three-nested conditional if structures deep, to allow us to incorporate the framecounter and
runningspeed integer variables into our conditional if() structure. This will make our animation code “wait” for six
pulse event cycles before it changes the animator false value to true, and then wait for another six pulse event cycles
before changing it back to false.
This is fairly complicated Java code, at least for a beginner Java 8 title, but game programming is inherently a
complex undertaking, so let’s go ahead and learn how to code this throttle mechanism for our run-cycle animation.
I want to teach you about advanced topics during this book, and this one (implementing a speed throttle) is one
that we simply can’t avoid, as this run speed using a simple Boolean alternating image state logic structure is not
feasible to use in our game, given the incredible speed of the JavaFX pulse event timing engine and its “console game”
60FPS frame rate, which is making our InvinciBagel sprite run cycle look not only unrealistic, but painful to look at!
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