We are developing a Plants Vs. Zombies grid defense style game. We want the "characters" that move to have there own health bar using the counter object. The problem is that when any of the characters gets hit all the health bars go down. We need to have an independent health bar for each object. We could do this by cloning the counter object and the character's active but it is my understanding that when you clone an active it also duplicates all the graphics and therefore increases the memory used. Since we are talking about dozens of cloned animated characters on or off the screen, that would use a lot of memory.
What I was thinking is to use duplicate objects but assign alterable values to each one as they colide with a detector off screen but when I started to map it out my brain when to mush. Does anyone have an idea of how to do this?
Again to clearify, we need to have duplicate actives (not cloned) with their own health bar(counter). The health bar will lock to the position of the character as it moves across the screen using: Always--->Set Position of "Coouter" relative to "Active"