Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

So, I fired up the game the other day and… watched as the GUI did crazy shit. I was using IntelliJ’s GUI builder thing as a sort of shortcut, because I find GUI programming obnoxious, and was hoping to take a shorcut. However, it looks like IntelliJ’s GUI Builder SUCKS in a billion different ways. It is clearly geared towards creating a bunch of static popup windows with minimal dynamic content changes. Also, it’s really hard to keep things consistent across screens, and for whatever reason I couldn’t update the static placeholder text I put in there. It doesn’t help that the tool uses this weird combination of Java code and XML, and I’m not really sure how they interact, or how the program knows to go to the Java vs. the XML and… basically too much annoying, not easily debuggable magic.

And having a bunch of different screens that you have to constantly make fullscreen (i.e. for a game) leads to much flickering and is utterly unacceptable.

After much swearing and cursing and just general being pissed off, I blew away all that garbage, took a week off, and am starting the GUI (and possibly much of the Controller) code from scratch. I decided to buckle down and actually learn the JavaFX library, and am using that now. On the bright side, shit be making a lot more sense, and I have the TitleScreen done (probably the simplest screen), and am currently working on the Character Status/Creator screen (which is one of the more complex ones, only the Dungeon and Combat screens are more complex). The Character Status screen actually works, and displays stuff. I just need to tweak it to make it look good.

So, the bad news is I’ve had some setbacks. The good news is I’ve learned some stuff, and I am pretty happy with the JavaFX library so far. Makes a ton more sense to me than Swing ever did.