Aside from user controls for games and simulations, you will, at times, want your user to click buttons, view text, and select items from menus. Imagine that you are creating a physics simulation and want to have your user set certain simulation parameters or that you have a store in your game where players can purchase upgrades. Or perhaps you want to create a dialogue between two actors in your scenario. In this chapter, we are going to explore techniques to provide various types of user interfaces (UIs). Specifically, we will look at the following topics:

Greenfoot provides little direct support to create user interfaces. There are only a few classes, such as Label and Counter, packaged with Greenfoot to help in this regard. So, we will have to build our own support. We will use Greenfoot Actors and the GreenfootImage class to create user interfaces and classes that...