Restarting a game

Question

I'm having trouble restarting a 2D game when the user presses the "New Game" button.

Structure of my game:

The game has several 'screens': Opening screen, instructions screen, main game screen, and a game-over screen.

Each screen is an instance of a class: OpeningScreen class, GameScreen class, etc.

There is a class named Main. This class has three roles.

• It's the JFrame (the window) of the program.
• It has the main method - first class to run.
• It has a method that change's screens.

When the program starts, this class runs. When it first runs:

1. Creates a new instance of itself (it's a JFrame-type class).
2. Creates an instance of every 'screen-class'. The constructor of each 'screen-class' takes the instance of Main as an argument: (aka: GameOverScreen gameOverScreen = new GameOver(this)).
3. Creates a new JPanel named mainPanel, and adds it to the JFrame. Any screen to be displayed will be contained in this JPanel (The screens are also JPanel-type classes).

How the changeScreen() method works:

The signature of changeScreen() is this: changeScreen(JPanel from, JPanel to).

Whenever a screen needs to be changed, the current screen that is displayed calls this method, like so: main.changeScreen(this, main.InstructionsScreen). It removes the previous screen from mainPanel and adds the new screen to mainPanel. As said, these screens are created when the program launches.

This is the method that changes screens:

public void changeScreen(JPanel from, JPanel to){

    mainPanel.remove(from);
    mainPanel.add(to);

    mainPanel.revalidate();
    mainPanel.repaint();

}

My problem:

After a game is finished, the Game class calls the changeScreen method: main.changeScreen(this, main.GameOverScreen) .

This replaces the game screen with a game over screen. Pressing the "New Game" button in the game-over screen, calls main.changeScreen(this, main.GameScreen) .

The problem: Pressing the "New Game" button in the game-over screen, indeed displays once again the instance of the Game class. But this is the old instance, so the game is not restarted. It's already finished.

I tried to do the following changes in changeScreen():

public void changeScreen(JPanel from, JPanel to){

    mainPanel.remove(from);

    if(to.equals(gameScreen)){
        gameScreen = null;
        gameScreen = new GameScreen(this);
    }
    mainPanel.add(gameScreen);

    mainPanel.revalidate();
    mainPanel.repaint();

}

This should reset the gameScreen object. But this creates a delay of about 10 seconds when pressing the "New Game" button.

What would be a good way of restarting the game?

Thank you

Answer 1

That's an OK way to do it. The way I do is that I have a ScreenManager which "loads" screens, those screens are implementing the IScreen interface and has different methods like LoadContent, UnloadContent and Initialize.

For instance, when I press the PLAY button in the main menu, the ScreenManager's addScreen function runs, sets the oldScreen variable's value to the newScreen's value(in this example the main menu screen is becoming the oldScreen) and creates, loads the new screen whilst "Unloading" the previous one. (Note that I am using a loading screen)

The when the unloading is done, and the LoadContent sets the ScreenManager's state to DONE, the ScreenManager is waiting for the user's input (press any key to continue). When it finally gets the input, the ScreenManager intializes the newScreen and removes the loading graphics.

In my ScreenManager, restarting is nothing else but calling the addScreen function of my ScreenManager.