Question

I have implemented Conway’s Game of Life problem in Java swing. Everything is working fine. As you can see in the screenshot below, whenever the “Tick” button is clicked, the game progresses to the next life form. Now, I am planning to include an “Autoplay” button alongside “Tick” button. The purpose of this autoplay is simple. When I hit it, an automated operation should carry on as if I am pressing tick button at an interval of 1 second.

I tried this. But this seems to block all the other operations. How to do this action in a separate thread? A small code snippet would get me going.

class AutoPlayListener implements ActionListener{
  public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
    if(e.getSource() == btnAutoPlay){
      while(true){
        Thread.sleep(1000); //InterruptedException try catch hidden
        btnTick.doClick();
      }
    }
  }
}

Answer 1

Use a javax.swing.Timer. It will be able to work with the existing ActionListener if the while(true) and Thread.sleep() calls are removed.