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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T20:27:47+00:00

So, what we need to implement is a tree-menu with several nodes (up to

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So, what we need to implement is a tree-menu with several nodes (up to hundreds). A node can have children and then can be expanded/collapsed. There is also a background lightning by mouse over and a background lightning by mouse selection.
Each node has a box, an icon and a text, which can be very large, occupying the whole width screen.

This is an example of an already working solution:

enter image description here

Basically I am:

  • rendering text a first time, just to get the length of an possible background highlight

  • rendering boxes and icon-textures (yeah I know, they are upside down at the moment)

  • rendering text a second time, first all the bold one and then all the normal one

This solution actually has a relative acceptable performance impact.

Then we tried another way, that is using the g Graphic java by drawing the tree menu and returning it as a bufferedImage to create at the end a big texture render it. All this obviously is done at every node collapse/expande and at each mouse movement.

This performed much better, but Java seems to have some big troubles handling the old bufferedImages. Indeed ram consumption increases constantly and forcing a garbage collection improves only slightly memory increasing, by slowing down it, but still…
Moreover performances fall, since the garbage collector is called every time and does not seem light at all.

So what I am going to ask you is: which is the best strategy for my needing?

Would be also maybe feasible to render each node on a different texture (actually three: one normal, one with a light background for mouse over and a last one with a normal background for mouse selection) and then at each display() just combine all these textures with the current tree-menu state?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    For the Java-approach: If the BufferedImage hasn’t changed in size (the width/height of your tree control), can’t you reuse it to avoid garbage collection?

    For the GL-approach, make sure you minimize texture switches. How do you render text? You can have a single large texture that contains all the normal and bold letters and just use different texture coordinates for each letter.

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