Is this possible?

Have you ever seen this done before in a game? If so can you give me a link?

so you want to make your own meter bar, for example an animated health bar.

if so, then yes. I Could make a simple example if this is the case.

Theres a few ways to do this, depending on the game your trying to make.

If i could see a screen shot of the game, i could help you with the best option.

Interface Bar Object.

Interface bar object is probably exactly what you're looking for as Stephen pointed out.

Besides extensions, simply having one active object that represents the "background" overlaid on top of the bar itself (which remains a constant animation), or even in HWA applying a dynamic alpha channel on top of it to make it transparent, would both work. Or depending on the animation, just rescaling it (change its X coefficient)

I've never used the interface bar extension before, but I just downloaded it and it looks like exactly what you wanted anyway
Actually I wrote that, and after taking a closer look, I'm going to replace some of my custom bars with that extension, thats one spiffy object!

Have you ever seen this done before in a game? If so can you give me a link? I would love to see this the way the above members mentioned. Here is an example of what I did. It's very primitive,.but pretty cool,..(I think??) LOL. Icould have done it better,.but I was in a rush.

Please login to see this link.

EDIT:
Well,.my example kinda stinks after looking at the examples that came with the Interface bar object. Oh well,.I tried..!!

Outcast, are you trying to make an textured vertical/ horizontal counter?
Or an animated vertical/ horizontal counter?

In either case, it would helt with more detail, tell us what kind of animation or texture you want, how should the animation or texture react when the counter increases/ decreases?

Yeah,.what Kingcool said..!

Like this maybe?

I have an example and tutorial of a health bar using no extensions. You can find both on my website.

Marv

I did an Animated Counter Example three posts up.
EDIT: I see

Quote from Outcast

I cant use this object I am afraid because its not supported with SWF Flash

Yeah that's the only downside to that extension. It's really awesome, but it needs to be ported to the other runtimes. I'd love to see that happen.

Hmm, i managed to do this in GM once.

Basically what you need to do is change the size of an Active Object without resizing it graphically.
This is not possible with Active Object, when you resize an Active Object its graphics are resized as well.
The Picture Object however is able to do this, but is not supported for Flash.

Quote from Shawn

Yeah that's the only downside to that extension. It's really awesome, but it needs to be ported to the other runtimes. I'd love to see that happen.

Shawn,.I agree and other extension too. Seems that most of us are building flash games now and it would be a good idea if the Clickteam spent some time and sorted this out with extension that are used most often. I'm not saying that the Clickteam is slacking at all here because they are great and I appreciate everything they do for us. It's just frustrating when you want to do something with an extension that you really need and know it will do the job in a game or whatever and it can't be used.