How do I prevent flickering when drawing to a JPanel?

Question

So I have a JFrame holding a JPanel, to which I'm drawing at about 60 FPS. I've been told that "Swing is double buffered by default", but, nevertheless I'm getting massive flickering. At first, I tried modifying the Graphics object from JPanel.getGraphics(), but was not surprised when it flickered (to black, the background colour of the game so far), as I assumed that it was redrawing when I blanked the screen. However, then I overrode paintComponent(), passing the Graphics to all objects to draw with, and made it call the super version, which I assumed would solve it, but no difference.

I'm still getting the Graphics object from the same place, i.e. JPanel.getGraphics(), because paintComponent() needs a Graphics argument. Should I be getting it from some other place? If not, what else could be causing the problem?

Answer 1

tried to activate double buffering manually (just to make sure)? setDoubleBuffered

On the other hand I always used a self writen double buffering at the (overwritten) update method. Something like that

Answer 2

Whoops. Looks like I should have been calling repaint(), not calling paintComponent(Graphics) directly. repaint() calls that as part of the double buffering process, so it shouldn't be called by hand if you want to avoid flickering.