life counter below 0

[slacer]

Hi,

for some reason I need the life counter to decrease below 0.
The problem is that the condition player 1 life counter below 0 will never be true. While it works for "equals 0", it does not seem to work with negative values.

Maybe the life counter can hold only positive values? (like an unsigned integer)

What is my goal?

Lets say the player has 4 space ships - 1 in use and 3 ship icons to show the number of available ships.
I want the level to quit if there is no ship left in the hangar and the pilot destroyed his current ship.

If the counter ends the level if the last ship is taken, it ends one ship to early.

- is it a bug if the number of lifes cannot be -1?
- what would you do?
- my workaround could be to add one additional live and hide its icon offscreen - but I would like to know why the condition is never met.

regards
slacer

[nivram]

Can you set the counter minimum to -1 in its properties?

Marv

[slacer]

It seems that the live counter is just a visual representation of player1.lives. But player is a system object and I could not find a way to define the counter minimum in this case.

Michael

[slacer]

It was not possible to let the live counter go below 0.
To reach the goal I had to add a real counter and alter the condition to change the frame if the new counter drops below 0.

Ok, I have to initialize and to decrement to different counter (player lives and counter) but it works.

The idea to simply move the lives control a bit off screen did not work, because the icons will be deleted from right to left and I need the control to be in the lower right corner.

[nivram]

Oh, lives object. Thought you meant a counter. Sorry I mis-read your post. You can't set the regular counter property to -1as a minimum?

Marv

[Dynasoft]

A fix for your original way would be to change your code from:
Player dies
-Subtract one life
Player has 0 lives
-Game over

To:
Player dies
+Player has 0 lives
-Game over
Player dies
+Player has greater than 0
-Subtract one life
-Respawn

That way the player having 0 lives is ok until his ship dies

EDIT: You can add more than one condition to the same event. I see you're new here, so you might not have realised. Just right-click on the event number and choose "add a new condition".

[slacer]

Great! This works good and is less confusing than my solution to use two places to keep track of the current number of lives.

It is my first day with this software and I have to learn how this engine works

Thank you all for your help