Problems creating a health bar

[Mudstick]

Hi everyone,

I've been working with MMF2 Developer for a few months creating a prototype for my current project and it's been amazing!

However, one of the issues I've been having a problem with is using the Counter Object to simulate a "health bar". A health bar should be able to accurately reflect the current health of a creature/thing/etc. using numbers to increase the counter or decrease the counter.

Using a vertical counter with "count up" option checked, the problem is that although the counter bar seems to grow when I "add 10 to the counter" (in the event under the counter) and it does not shrink when I subtract 10 from the counter. All of the values are correct such as initial value, min value and max value.

Perhaps I'm missing something but I can't seem to get my health bar to fluctuate on demand. Given that fact that being able to create a quick health bar would be most useful in video games I can't understand why a fluctuate option is seemingly not available via the counter object.

Of course I could make a custom "active" object and create the functionality of a health bar that way but that's going to take a bit more work and it would be much easier using the counter's horizontal or vertical options.

In general I've found the counter object to be a bit unstable. I used it to create a decrementing on-screen timer and sometimes it shows up and sometimes it does not. To solve the problem I created a custom active object.

I've done a search of these forums but have not found an answer to my problem. Could anyone shed some light on something I may be missing?

Thanks in advance!

-Alex

[mobichan]

What do you mean by fluctuate? You can easily make a counter bar increase or decrease by having actions that add or subtract values from it.

If you want it to always decrease, then just have an event like:

+Every X seconds
-->Subtract 1 from counter

[Dynasoft]

Is it set to "display as backdrop"? It's probably still the default, and it causes problems with updating sometimes...

[Mudstick]

Thanks for the good advice. I believe my counters were corrupted somehow. I created new ones from scratch and they seem to work fine now. It's possible they may have been corrupted when I had opened them up in "animation" mode.

-Alex

[gamemaker]

ok what is happining with my vertical bar is it isnt showing up in the game can u tell me whats happining?

[Werbad]

What are the max/min values set to? Is Display as background checked?

[Taco]

the same thing happend to me. i couldnt customize it or anything . it stayed the same color