Java application drawing strangely - java

I have a legacy Java application that uses Java 1.3
It works fine on windows Xp but now I need to make it run on windows 7.
I have installed the 1.3 jdk however when it first loads, the app won't render properly. Bits of the screen just show grey background, selecting buttons won't load a new screen etc.
I do know watching the output from the app it just purely graphics not rendering properly.
However if I press "Ctrl-alt-delete" and then just press "cancel" the software runs perfectly.
If I have a second monitor plugged in, it runs perfectly.
Has anyone got any suggestions how to make app run perfectly first time.
Thanks

Firstly, update your java, no excuses not to.
You can try the hack of resizing your component to a different size and then back again. I find this is the best way to make sure that swing doesn't do this sort of mischief with black squares here and there.
These things happen from time to time with non native tools for desktop development as opposed to those specifically designed for the targeted platform.

Related

Java Swing HiDPI Scaling

I have created a program using Java 8 that utilises a Swing GUI in the Eclipse IDE. To scale images and icons to appropriate sizes, it gets and uses the screen resolution. Upon compiling the program within Eclipse, the program displays perfectly fine, and everything seems to operate as it should. However, when I export the project as a "Runnable Jar", and run the program, the image scaling and the program look and feel are all off.
Upon further investigation, it appears that the runnable jar was returning a screen resolution that is exactly 2.5x less then that in eclipse (which is the actual resolution - 3840x2160 vs 1536x864). There is circumstantial evidence across the internet that Java 8 Look and Feels (or something of the sort) don't support HiDPI screen scaling. There are scattered solutions that claim to fix the problem, like updating to Java versions past 8, or by adding arguments to the jar compilation (whatever that means). This is already confusing to a Java novice, and it is only made more confusing by the program being displayed perfectly when run/compiled within the Eclipse IDE.
My question is whether anyone knows how to get a program compiled in Java using Swing to scale correctly on an HiDPI screen, and what the process is that I need to follow to compile a working program?
EDIT 1: Something interesting to note is that in my Windows settings, the "Scale and Layout", "Change the size of text, apps, and other items" is set to exactly 250%, meaning that this setting is obviously the cause of the scaling issues I am encountering. Does someone know how to bypass this setting from within the program, or why it works when I run it through Eclipse?
Java 8 does not support High DPI. On Windows, it runs in DPI unaware mode and relies on Windows to stretch the window bitmap to the scale set for the monitor in the settings. It means the UI of the application looks blurry when displayed on a High DPI monitor.
Later versions of Java, Java 11 and above, support per-monitor High DPI settings. The UI of your application is correctly scale up according to the settings, the text remains crisp. For the icons and images to remain crisp, you should use MultiResolutionImage or its basic implementation BaseMultiResolutionImage to provide higher resolution alternatives.
You should not base your images based on the screen resolution but rather on the scale set for a monitor. For example, a Full HD monitor 1920×1080 with 150% scale has the effective resolution 1280×720, it is the effective resolution that Java reports to you.

libGDX as a "launcher" app

I have made a light weight java web-server serving html files and static content (made with pure java library nanohttpd), i have successfully made a javaFX launcher window that has a single button, clicking button simply runs the server in the background and opens the localhost URL in Android/PC browser (I was unsuccessful in making an IOS version using javaFX)
I am thinking of using libGDX as "launcher window" because of IOS support and access to mobile specific hardware like SMS/GPS which javaFX don't have.
I am targeting IOS/Android/PC, I'd like to ask libGDX developers how possible is this given my target platforms?
Yes you can
There's a catch though, you may have to build the UI the game dev way
I've made a game or two using it and had rather steep learning curve in the beginning to get a hold on to how it worked. For example you'll have to provide the images for button, background and also, the pressed view of the button... like that. But your app is not a game. So you won't have to worry that much.
Once you learned how to place them in the screen successfully, there is not much to worry about because the API provides everything you need to carry on from there.
Also I found enough resources/tutorials online enough to make a game from ground up. So you'll definitely can.
And there's very little to worry about your multi-platform problem.

Misaligned Screen in JCEF (Java Chromium Embedded Framework) Application

I have a Java 7 application which is using Java Chromium Embedded Framework to draw html/css into two windows it launches. This works quite well in 4 of 5 PCs that I've run it on. In one case there are alignment issues with the rendered html. Successful runs include Windows 7/8/8.1. Unsuccessful run is 8.1 on an HP TouchSmart Envy, straight out of the box. Perhaps the only distinguishable differences are that this PC is new and that it has a touch screen.
As you can see, the content is shifted upward while being additionally clipped at the right and bottom sides. This is true of both windows that the application opens. What's even stranger is that mouse events (such as the :hover effects on the buttons and click events) are received in their correct position -- clicking about two inches below "Start Presentation" fires the button's click event.
Frankly, I have no idea what to try next on this. I've tried installing and uninstalling graphics-related software, adjusting the screen resolution, adding and removing the second screen, restarting the pc, and updating the onboard graphics driver.
As I have no idea what else could be causing this inconsistency, any advice in troubleshooting this issue would be fantastic.
As it turns out, this appeared to be related to the way JCEF interacts with system drivers. Going through Windows Update for the first time, restarting, and returning to the device's native resolution solved this issue.

My java program freezes when other window is active

I have developed a java program that runs fine in Mac OS X (10.6.7).
But if I click on another window such as Finder or another application, my program freezes, or the graphics are not updated anymore. If I click on my program again the graphics are updated again and runs well.
Does anyone know what that can be?
I coded it with the LWJGL and slick libraries.
Thanks!
Taken from here:
By default slick will not render anything if it does not have focus,
so good practice for applets is to set
container.setAlwaysRender(true);
so that it always renders even when it doesn't have focus.
This seems to refer to GameContainer.setAlwaysRender. Although the forum post talks about applet, both AppGameContainer (standalone-application) and AppletGameContainer.Container extend from it.

Why does my Java application run so slowly in full-screen mode? (and fine when windowed)

I'm working on a Java program that is intended to run in full-screen mode. It uses numerous of customized Swing components and Java2D-drawn components that need to be updated and repainted several times a second. And it was working relatively fine on my underpowered work PC.
But then I tried it out at home on my much more powerful PC. And it ran noticeably slower. Triggering an event that should have instantly updated about 20 different screen elements instead caused an effect where each element seemed to take at least a quarter second each to repaint itself. So instead of instantaneous changes it was taking 5 seconds to complete each screen change.
I thought that maybe I was trying to repaint too often or in the wrong manner. But after experimenting a bit with other ideas, on a hunch I let the application start up in a windowed mode instead of in full-screen mode. And with that one change, everything started to work perfectly fast and smooth.
So I suppose there are really two issues here: Why does full-screen mode cause this problem? And why is it only causing this problem on my faster computer? I do suspect there's an OS-related bug. My slow work computer is Windows XP while the home one is Windows 7. I saw in other threads that Aero on Win7 can cause Java speed issues so I tried disabling it. That did cause a small speed improvement but it still wasn't as smooth as when I ran in windowed mode. Has anyone else had performance issues running full-screen Java apps on Win7? And if so, is there a work around?
I found the solution. I stumbled upon Oracle's Java System properties page (http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/2d/flags.html) and figured there might be something useful there. While using the trace command I noticed that there were a lot of Direct3D references. Since nothing in my app is 3D, I thought that strange. So I added -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false to my Java command line. As the page says that option will "turn off the Java 2D system's use of Direct3D". And it worked like a charm. Now it runs perfectly smoothly on my Windows 7 machine in full screen mode.

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