(This is number #1 in my intended series of Programming tips for Java. They are probably blindingly obvious to most people, but they have passed me by until recently, and it doesn't do any harm to mention them in case anyone else has missed them to).
Daemons
Todays tip is all about setting threads as "Daemons".
I used to have a problem in my games that used multiple threads, in that it was very hard to get them to actually end. Even when all the windows were closed, there was still a process running in the background. I usually fixed this by adding a "System.exit(0);" to the code when I wanted it all to end, but this is certainly not the best way to go about it.
A Java program ends when there are only "daemon" threads running. This means, in short, that any thread which isn't what you would call the "main program thread" should be marked as a daemon so that it ends when the main program thread ends. This is simply a case of writing "mythread.setDaemon(true);". Incidentally, threads are not daemons by default.
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