Swing animation running extremely slow

Question

I have a problem with my current animation that I'm running using Java Swing. It is a discrete event simulation and the text based simulation is working fine, I'm just having problems connecting the simulating to GUI output.

For this example I will have 10 cars to be simulated. The cars are represented by JPanels which I will elaborate on in a few moments.

So consider, the event process_car_arrival. Every time this event is scheduled for execution, I'm adding a Car object to an ArrayList called cars in my Model class. The Car class has the following relevant attributes:

Point currentPos; // The current position, initialized in another method when knowing route.
double speed; // giving the speed any value still causes the same problem but I have 5 atm.
RouteType route; // for this example I only consider one simple route

In addition it has the following method move() :

switch (this.route) {
    case EAST:
        this.currentPos.x -= speed; 
        return this.currentPos;
.
.
.
//only above is relevant in this example

This is all well. so in theory the car traverses along a straight road from east to west as I just invoke the move() method for each car I want to move.

Returning to the process_car_arrival event. After adding a Car object it invokes a method addCarToEast() in the View class. This adds a JPanel at the start of the road going from east to west.

Going to the View class now I have a ** separate** thread which does the following ( the run() method) :

@Override
    public void run() {
        while (true) {
            try {
                Thread.sleep(30);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            if (!cars.isEmpty()) {

                cars.get(i).setLocation(
                        new Point(getModel.getCars().get(i).move()));

                if (i == cars.size() - 1) {
                    i = 0;
                } else {
                    i++;
                }
            }
        }
    }

The above does move the car from east to west smoothly at first. But after there is 3-4 cars moving it just ends up being EXTREMELY slow and when I have 10 cars moving it just ends up moving very little.

Just to clear up, at the moment in the Model class there's an ArrayList of Car objects, and in the View class there is also an ArrayList of JPanel objects representing the cars. I'm trying to match the Car objects to the JPanels, but I'm obviously doing a cra**y job.

I suspect that I'm doing something insanely inefficient but I don't know what. I thought initially maybe it's accessing the ArrayList so much which I guess would make it really slow.

Any pointers to what I can change to make it run smoothly?

Answer 1

Based on this previous answer, the example below simulates a fleet of three cabs moving randomly on a rectangular grid. A javax.swing.Timer drives the animation at 5 Hz. The model and view are tightly coupled in CabPanel, but the animation may provide some useful insights. In particular, you might increase the number of cabs or lower the timer delay.

import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.Color;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.EventQueue;
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.awt.Graphics2D;
import java.awt.GridLayout;
import java.awt.Point;
import java.awt.RenderingHints;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import java.text.DecimalFormat;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Random;
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JComboBox;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.Timer;

/**
 * @see https://stackoverflow.com/a/14887457/230513
 * @see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5617027
 */

public class FleetPanel extends JPanel {

    private static final Random random = new Random();
    private final MapPanel map = new MapPanel();
    private final JPanel control = new JPanel();
    private final List<CabPanel> fleet = new ArrayList<CabPanel>();
    private final Timer timer = new Timer(200, null);

    public FleetPanel() {
        super(new BorderLayout());
        fleet.add(new CabPanel("Cab #1", Hue.Cyan));
        fleet.add(new CabPanel("Cab #2", Hue.Magenta));
        fleet.add(new CabPanel("Cab #3", Hue.Yellow));
        control.setLayout(new GridLayout(0, 1));
        for (CabPanel cp : fleet) {
            control.add(cp);
            timer.addActionListener(cp.listener);
        }
        this.add(map, BorderLayout.CENTER);
        this.add(control, BorderLayout.SOUTH);
    }

    public void start() {
        timer.start();
    }

    private class CabPanel extends JPanel {

        private static final String format = "000000";
        private final DecimalFormat df = new DecimalFormat(format);
        private JLabel name = new JLabel("", JLabel.CENTER);
        private Point point = new Point();
        private JLabel position = new JLabel(toString(point), JLabel.CENTER);
        private int blocks;
        private JLabel odometer = new JLabel(df.format(0), JLabel.CENTER);
        private final JComboBox colorBox = new JComboBox();
        private final JButton reset = new JButton("Reset");
        private final ActionListener listener = new ActionListener() {

            @Override
            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                int ds = random.nextInt(3) - 1;
                if (random.nextBoolean()) {
                    point.x += ds;
                } else {
                    point.y += ds;
                }
                blocks += Math.abs(ds);
                update();
            }
        };

        public CabPanel(String s, Hue hue) {
            super(new GridLayout(1, 0));
            name.setText(s);
            this.setBackground(hue.getColor());
            this.add(map, BorderLayout.CENTER);
            for (Hue h : Hue.values()) {
                colorBox.addItem(h);
            }
            colorBox.setSelectedIndex(hue.ordinal());
            colorBox.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {

                @Override
                public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                    Hue h = (Hue) colorBox.getSelectedItem();
                    CabPanel.this.setBackground(h.getColor());
                    update();
                }
            });
            reset.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {

                @Override
                public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                    point.setLocation(0, 0);
                    blocks = 0;
                    update();
                }
            });
            this.add(name);
            this.add(odometer);
            this.add(position);
            this.add(colorBox);
            this.add(reset);
        }

        private void update() {
            position.setText(CabPanel.this.toString(point));
            odometer.setText(df.format(blocks));
            map.repaint();
        }

        private String toString(Point p) {
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            sb.append(Math.abs(p.x));
            sb.append(p.x < 0 ? " W" : " E");
            sb.append(", ");
            sb.append(Math.abs(p.y));
            sb.append(p.y < 0 ? " N" : " S");
            return sb.toString();
        }
    }

    private class MapPanel extends JPanel {

        private static final int SIZE = 16;

        public MapPanel() {
            this.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(32 * SIZE, 32 * SIZE));
            this.setBackground(Color.lightGray);
        }

        @Override
        protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
            super.paintComponent(g);
            Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D) g;
            g2d.setRenderingHint(
                RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING,
                RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);
            int w = this.getWidth();
            int h = this.getHeight();
            g2d.setColor(Color.gray);
            for (int col = SIZE; col <= w; col += SIZE) {
                g2d.drawLine(col, 0, col, h);
            }
            for (int row = SIZE; row <= h; row += SIZE) {
                g2d.drawLine(0, row, w, row);
            }

            for (CabPanel cp : fleet) {
                Point p = cp.point;
                int x = SIZE * (p.x + w / 2 / SIZE) - SIZE / 2;
                int y = SIZE * (p.y + h / 2 / SIZE) - SIZE / 2;
                g2d.setColor(cp.getBackground());
                g2d.fillOval(x, y, SIZE, SIZE);
            }
        }
    }

    public enum Hue {

        Cyan(Color.cyan), Magenta(Color.magenta), Yellow(Color.yellow),
        Red(Color.red), Green(Color.green), Blue(Color.blue),
        Orange(Color.orange), Pink(Color.pink);
        private final Color color;

        private Hue(Color color) {
            this.color = color;
        }

        public Color getColor() {
            return color;
        }
    }

    private static void display() {
        JFrame f = new JFrame("Dispatch");
        f.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        FleetPanel fp = new FleetPanel();
        f.add(fp);
        f.pack();
        f.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
        f.setVisible(true);
        fp.start();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {

            @Override
            public void run() {
                display();
            }
        });
    }
}