Controlling a platform game character with the mouse.

[subsidian]

Hello there, I am a beginner to Java and this site (not sure if this post is in the right place either, apologies if it isn't

Anyway I have been trying to make a simple platform game which currently consists of an image/sprite moving round on an image via Key events. The character currently jumps using the space bar.

However what i would like to do is make my character jump by mousePressing on the character, dragging the mouse downwards and letting go, like pulling back a catapult.

This has unfortunately caused me nothing but headaches.

Currently i cannot get the game to recognise when the character is being clicked, is there an easy way to do this?

Currently my character is just an ImageIcon, but im not sure if it has to be an object or a shape or something, I'm pretty confused. Mouse Listener is so much more complicated than using a keyboard!

Cheers.

[Norm]

recognise when the character is being clicked

The mouse listener can determine where the click was made and see if it is on a character.

[subsidian]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I can get the mouse listener to give me it's it's MX and MY on click, i also have the X and Y of my character...i made 2 new integers CX and CY which add 90 pixels (the size of the image) to X and Y so the image is easy to click on.

Then iv set if (mx == x && mx <= cx && my == y && my <= cy){ then for example do a system.out message, but nothing, no errors either.

I'm pretty sure im trying to do this the wrong way and that there is an easier method.

[Norm]

Try debugging by adding some println statements to the code that print out the x,y location of the mouse click and the x,y location of the character so you can see it the click is inside the rectangle surrounding the character.

Testing with == is unusual when testing locations. Use >= for the left hand side and <= for the right hand side.
Same logic for top: >= and <= for the bottom


Another way would be to use the Rectangle class's contains() method.

[subsidian]

Wow thanks! The first == were all that was wrong.