Question

I am making some sort of turn-based battle system in a JFrame where the player clicks a button when it’s his turn. The problem is: how can the program wait for a mouse click on the button? It goes like this:

while it is the player’s turn {

• wait for mouse input

• if input == attack (for example)

     -> attack
  

  else if input == item

     -> use item
  

  and so on

Answer 1

You don’t wait for a click; you let Swing do that for you. Instead, you put whatever you want to do into an ActionListener and attach it to the button, so it gets executed when the button is clicked.

As far as the turns go, you just need a member variable someplace that keeps track of whose turn it is; the button handler then has to look at that variable to know what to do.

One good way to structure things, by the way, might be to have a Player class, and a Game class, and a member in Game called currentPlayer. Then the ActionListener (which keeps the Game object as a member variable of its own) could look at currentPlayer in the Game and simply invoke makeMove() on the appropriate Player object.