[OpenMap Users] blinking/flicker reduction

Hello,
I have a layer that shows an aircraft flying over the map, and the layer
asks the MapBean to constantly recenter at the aircraft (at intervals on the
order of a second). A colleague asked what I could do to reduce the
"blinking" effect (I'm not sure if this qualifies as flicker) that occurs
when the Geopolitical layer is drawn -- in other words, the quick visible
alternation between the Geopolitical layer and the blue background behind
it.

I've attempted double-buffering of the Geopolitical layer, which seems to
have a more pronounced blinking than the normal version. Then I noticed
that the BufferedMapBean paints all layers to a buffer, which would help
explain why I can't improve performance through additional double buffering.
Is this correct?

I also tried to find out if there's a way to cause the screen not to erased
or cleared before drawing the new Geopolitical layer (just overwriting), in
the hope that this would reduce the blinking delay, but I'm not sure how to
do this. I read that overriding the update(graphics) method that is
inherited from JComponent can achieve this, but I only saw this in reference
to applets. I tried overriding the update method in various places and it
never got called by anything.

Perhaps everything that can be done to reduce the delay has been done and
this flicker is simply a delay resulting from copying the buffered image to
the screen?

If anyone has encountered this type of issue before, your thoughts would be
much appreciated. I'm very new to Java graphics.

Thanks!
Kim

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