Question

I am currently making this text-based rpg game with a simple GUI. I was happy to find the good start at it but then there is something I stumbled upon that made me stop coding for a while.

If you are making this in console, you could easily use this code to pause the movements of the characters for a while, like:

System.out.println("[enemy]");
Thread.sleep(1000);
System.out.println("The local guard waves his sword and tries to stab you in the back, but you quickly parried and tried for a counterattack but you failed.");

If you are doing this on a JTextArea, you’d use the setText but
if you use Thread.sleep it doesnt work and coding setText again, would erase the old text and replace it with the new text, so the records of the fight will not be fully displayed on the game. Is there a way to fix this?

Answer 1

for the setText part, you should have a variable which will hold the text and when you want to add a string, you append it and set the text again:

String text ="[enemy]";
textfield.setText(text);
text+= "\nblablabla ..";
textfield.setText(text);

UPDATE:

Some are suggesting to use the append method which is relatively good. Sometimes in the game you would like to append and sometimes replace the whole text (a new character talks), I would recommend something like this:

textfield.setText("[enemy]\n");
textfield.append("blablabla");

//When someone else wanna talk:

thread.Sleep(1000);
textfield.setText("[me]\n");
textfield.append("moreblablabla");