whats up guys, I'm taking my first software engineering class and for the class project my group (of 5) is going to implement an elementary school level mathmatics tutoring program.

We would like to use animations in the tutorial but none of us have ever done animations and the tutorial will be a java applet.

The only thing I could come up with was to have the animations playing in a shockwave window beside the applet. But i've never created shockwaves before, are they difficult? Is there an easier way?

all comments are welcome.

You can do animation in java by using the swing or awt libraries.
I found this site it may be useful if you are using awt. The swing library probably also applies but your going to have to do some converting.

http://www.javareference.com/bycatview.jsp?rootcat=2&cat=AWT

Originally posted by okinrus
You can do animation in java by using the swing or awt libraries.
Urm, I only use Swing and AWT for the UI, not animations. For Animations I use either Java 2D (http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/2D/) or Java 3D (http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/), but off course ymmv.

There are lots of sampes on the Java 2D site using animation, e.g. a bouncing balls applet. They can be downloaded both as applet and as source: Java 2D samples (http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/2D/samples/suite/index.html). The 3D site also has examples, but none by Sun itself. Plenty of third party demos however, and also a list of links to online applications using Java 3D.

If you do wish to use Swing for writing animations, look at this part of the Swing tutorial (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/painting/animation.html).

cool, thanks guys, I'll look into those suggestions.

I don't know exactly what the requirements for your project are, so this might not be a useful suggestion, but take a look at Slithy (http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/dougz/slithy/).

I don't have any Java exp. but from the Shockwave end, creating a Flash animation (as opposed to a Shockwave setup, which would be more than it sounds like you need) is very very easy. it is not the most streamlined when it comes to playback (lots of power is required to play a fairly simple animation), but it is easy to create, and fairly powerful in what it can do.

You can (at least at one time you could, I can't tell if the rules are still the same) get a free education-only three month trial of Flash which will allow you to create deliverable output within the time limit. You could go onto their site, DL the trial, and produce what you need.

www.macromedia.com