Question

I’m writing a card game. Right now I’m having problems with mouse handling. Below is the timer that handles the game flow of drawing and discarding cards.

    final Timer timer = new Timer(1000, null);

    timer.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
        public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
            b.players[p].drawCard();
            if(p==0) // player zero is the human player
            {
                timer.stop();
                // ...
                b.players[p].discardCard(i);
                timer.start();
            }
            else
                b.players[p].discardCard(0);
            p=(p+1)%4;
            b.repaint();
        }
    });

The thing is that I want to stop the timer, wait until the user clicks the card he wants to discard, then start the timer again. b implements MouseListener in a basic way:

public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent arg0) 
{
    clickX = arg0.getX();
    clickY = arg0.getY();
}

There’s also the xYtoCardIndex() method somewhere out there.

What do I do here? I assume I have to do nothing in a nonblocking way, right?

Answer 1

In pseudo-code, in your MouseEventListener :

public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent arg0) 
{
    clickX = arg0.getX();
    clickY = arg0.getY();

    Card discarded = getCard(clickX,clickY);
    b.players[p].discardCard(discarded);

    // The card has been discarded, I can start my timer again.
    timer.start();
}

In your drawCard function :

    public void drawCard() {
        // Stop the timer
        timer.stop();

        // Do the drawing.
    }

This way, when the player draws a card, the timer stops until a card is discarded.