Asteroids with Windows (A Goodbye To javax.swing)

A broken apart window shot down with that ship in the bottom.

Inspiration

I've built things with javax.swing before in this nature, but I found that it's laggy and doesn't work quite well. I've decided that I may want to switch to cocoa, but as a bittersweet goodbye, I wanted to do something weird with javax.swing that went beyond my previous uses of it.

What it does

You play an Asteroids-like game where you destroy a window.

How I built it

I used (abused?) javax.swing's irregular windows feature by using undecorated windows with irregular shapes and drawing to them.

Challenges I ran into

Getting the shapes of the irregular windows to actually work was surprisingly difficult. Javax.swing also lags quite a bit with more and more windows, which is understandable.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm just glad that I got all of this to work! Especially the illusion of the window breaking apart by using a BufferedImage of the task bar at the top of the window.

What I learned

I learned how to use BufferedImages to make it look like a window was falling apart.

What's next for A Final Goodbye To javax.swing

If there was anything next, it would be to put some pretty pictures in the breaking window. Actually, a friend also recommended having a game of asteroids in that window, which gets harder as the window breaks apart, so maybe that too?