Well I have noticed something is wrong in the repaint or somewhere, because when my player moves around, the tiles skip and have trouble keeping up.

Heres a picture:http://photobucket.com/albums/y10/bgilb/vanerror.png

The map is 4 layers ( 2 below the character and 2 above )

Please post your code, that yould help? Do you override the paint method?

Its generally not good coding style to access variables directly; thats what accessor/mutator methods are for.

Unless you have a good reason to, make all fields private and only provide accessor methods if you think the class should provide access to the data.

One exeption to this could be subclasses accessing super class fields - when you want a peice of data to be accessed directly by subclasses and not by any other class. However, to start with, even in the case of inheritance (subclasses accessing superclass data) I would keep most data private and provide accessors with the appropriate access modifier (private, package private, protected or public).

For example, say I'm working on a project with a few friends. I assume that in the future any subclasses of my new class will use protected accessor methods to get at its private data. Lets also say my class uses lazy-loading to load data from a file or data store and thus that data only gets set when the accessor method for that data first gets called.

Later on, one of my team comes along and edits part of the class, thinking to himself "Hell, we can just make this variable protected and avoid a whole load of method calls" he edits some of the private data and so bypasses my lazy loading accessor method, assuming that the accessor method does nothing other than return the value.

In this example, my friend has just introduced a bug into the project by making the private data protected. Without a decent test suite this bug could go undetected for months, and could well be hard to trace by the time it starts causing problems.

To cut a long story short; try not to break encapsulation, even for subclasses. And don't avoid calling methods because you think it'll slow your app down.

I also recommend reading: Effective Java, one of the few Java programming books you should bother reading.

Jon