Which layout manager to use on this game?

Question

Which layout manager to use on this game?

Answer 1

IMHO, using layouts and components is not a good solution to your problem, personally, I'd lean towards a custom painting solution instead.

Start with a basic concept of a piece, it needs to know it's location, it's size, it's color, be able to paint itself and possibly be relocatable, something like...

public interface Piece {
    public Rectangle getBounds();
    public Color getColor();
    public void setLocation(Point point);
    public void paint(Graphics2D g2d);
}

From this, you can define what ever shapes you need, for example...

public abstract class AbstractPiece implements Piece {

    private Rectangle bounds;
    private Color color;

    @Override
    public void setLocation(Point point) {
        bounds.setLocation(point);
    }

    @Override
    public Rectangle getBounds() {
        return bounds;
    }

    @Override
    public Color getColor() {
        return color;
    }

    public void setBounds(Rectangle bounds) {
        this.bounds = bounds;
    }

    public void setColor(Color color) {
        this.color = color;
    }

}

public class Square extends AbstractPiece {

    public Square(Point location, int size, Color color) {
        Rectangle bounds = new Rectangle();
        bounds.setLocation(location);
        bounds.setSize(size, size);
        setBounds(bounds);
        setColor(color);
    }

    @Override
    public void paint(Graphics2D g2d) {
        g2d.setColor(getColor());
        g2d.fill(getBounds());
        g2d.setColor(Color.GRAY);
        Rectangle bounds = getBounds();
        g2d.drawLine(bounds.x + (bounds.width / 2), bounds.y, bounds.x + (bounds.width / 2), bounds.y + bounds.height);
        g2d.drawLine(bounds.x, bounds.y + (bounds.height / 2), bounds.x + bounds.width, bounds.y + (bounds.height / 2));
    }

}

This is just a basic square, nothing fancy, but, it's self contained, easy to create and manage. You can create any combination of shapes you like using this simple pattern, at the end of the day, your board class won't care, it just needs to the space it occupies and how to paint it, speaking for which, you need some kind of container to manage all these shapes...

public class PuzzelPane extends JPanel {

    private List<Piece> pieces;

    public PuzzelPane() {
        Dimension size = getPreferredSize();
        pieces = new ArrayList<>(25);
        Point location = new Point((size.width - 50) / 2, (size.width - 50) / 2);
        pieces.add(new Square(location, 50, Color.BLUE));
    }

    @Override
    public Dimension getPreferredSize() {
        return new Dimension(200, 200);
    }

    @Override
    protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
        super.paintComponent(g);
        for (Piece piece : pieces) {
            Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D) g.create();
            piece.paint(g2d);
            g2d.dispose();
        }
    }

}

This is a really simply concept, it has a List to maintain all the available shapes and simply loops over this to paint them in the paintComponent method

Couple it with the idea from this example and this example and you have the ability to now drag the shapes

Answer 2

To expand on kaetzacoatl's comment, you should not use a LayoutManager for this at all, for several reasons:

• They do not have the flexibility for more complex setups.
• They are quite hard to work with for non-trivial movement of elements.
• They mostly make sense for elements that can be resized and maybe wrapped or stretched, which I assume does not make sense for tiles in a puzzle game.

Instead, I would advise to use something like a canvas and draw your puzzle pieces with coordinates.