Under the sea

Explore an "under the sea" application and its animation engine

By Jeff Friesen, JavaWorld.com, 09/25/06

In version 1.4 of the Java 2 SDK, Sun Microsystems introduced support for full-screen exclusive mode, an operating system feature that lets programs obtain exclusive access to and render their output to the entire screen, which results in high-performance graphics. (Microsoft Windows implements full-screen exclusive mode via its DirectX technology, for example.) This Java Fun and Games installment reveals this support in the context of an "under the sea" application and its animation engine.

This article first introduces you to the "under the sea" (UTS) application, where you learn about the application's image and audio resources. The article next explores the application's architecture in terms of the application class, the animation and audio classes, and the resource-loader class. You next tour the animation engine's engine class, animation and audio interfaces, and exception classes. In closing, this article focuses on how to deploy the application.

Introducing UTS

I've created a UTS application that works with the animation engine to animate underwater sea life over the entire screen. This application's source code, audio/image resource, and miscellaneous files can be downloaded from Resources.

This figure presents a single animation frame. This frame reveals a suitable background, an animated angel fish, two instances of an animated tiger barb, two instances of an animated zebra fish, two instances of an animated plant, and three instances of an animated bubble sequence.

The figure shows various graphics images that I've combined into a somewhat realistic underwater scene: I created the background image with the Terragen scenery generator and enhanced the resulting image to achieve a bluish haze in the distance; the angel fish, tiger barb, and zebra fish images were made available to me courtesy of Dave Sutton at Sevenoaks Art; and the bubbles/plants images are my own creations.

Each type of fish requires 16 images (8 for moving left to right, and 8 for moving right to left), the bubble sequence requires 8 images, and the plant animation requires 3 images. The background image and one other image (used for hiding the mouse cursor) round out the image resources. These image resources are organized into gif files that are stored in a hierarchical resource directory structure, rooted in the images directory:

images
  angelfish
    lfish1.gif
    lfish2.gif
    lfish3.gif
    lfish4.gif
    lfish5.gif
    lfish6.gif
    lfish7.gif
    lfish8.gif
    rfish1.gif
    rfish2.gif
    rfish3.gif
    rfish4.gif
    rfish5.gif
    rfish6.gif
    rfish7.gif
    rfish8.gif
  bubbles
    bubbles1.gif
    bubbles2.gif
    bubbles3.gif
    bubbles4.gif
    bubbles5.gif
    bubbles6.gif
    bubbles7.gif
    bubbles8.gif
  misc
    background.gif
    white.gif
  plant
    plant1.gif
    plant2.gif
    plant3.gif
  tigerbarb
    lfish1.gif
    lfish2.gif
    lfish3.gif
    lfish4.gif
    lfish5.gif
    lfish6.gif
    lfish7.gif
    lfish8.gif
    rfish1.gif
    rfish2.gif
    rfish3.gif
    rfish4.gif
    rfish5.gif
    rfish6.gif
    rfish7.gif
    rfish8.gif
  zebrafish
    lfish1.gif
    lfish2.gif
    lfish3.gif
    lfish4.gif
    lfish5.gif
    lfish6.gif
    lfish7.gif
    lfish8.gif
    rfish1.gif
    rfish2.gif
    rfish3.gif
    rfish4.gif
    rfish5.gif
    rfish6.gif
    rfish7.gif
    rfish8.gif

Along with presenting animations, the UTS application is capable of playing an audio clip (in the Sun AU format) to add realism. This audio clip can be toggled off and on by pressing the "A" key.

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