Accessing elements inside a GraphicsContext in JavaFX canvas

I’m implementing a simple hockey game following an MVC pattern. I’m having trouble refreshing the player’s position, which I have created inside a canvas using the GraphicsContext.drawImage() method. I’m inside an AnimationTimer anonymous class, inside the handle method.

The positions and boundaries are all reflected to the backend,so I don’t really need to do any particular logic here, I just want to refresh the player’s position on every frame, based on its position calculated inside the model, but I can’t access the image I’ve drawn before in any way. Here’s the code:

DefaultController controller;

@FXML
public void initialize() {
    
    controller = new DefaultController(800, 400);
    
    double playerX = controller.getField().getPlayer().getX();
    double playerY = controller.getField().getPlayer().getY();
    
    double enemyX = controller.getField().getEnemy().getX();
    double enemyY = controller.getField().getEnemy().getY();

    context.drawImage(new Image("player.png"),playerX, playerY);
    context.drawImage(new Image("enemy.png"),enemyX, enemyY);

    AnimationTimer timer = new AnimationTimer() {
        @Override
        public void handle(long now) {
            pane.getScene().addEventHandler(KeyEvent.KEY_PRESSED, (key) -> {
                if (key.getCode() == KeyCode.UP) {
                    controller.getField().getPlayer().setLocation(playerX,playerY-0.1)

                    // how do I update the player image position inside the canvas?
                }
            });
        }
    };
    timer.start();
}

Answer

You are following a completely wrong approach. You cannot update anything in a Canvas once it is drawn. You can just erase it and redraw it again. For what you are trying to do the scene graph is much better suited.

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Answer