Plants Vs. Zombies Style Game - Health bar question

[Puff_N_Stuff]

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"

[King_Cool]

Give all your Character/ Enmy Objects an AlterableValue called Health_
Give all your Character/ Enmy Objects an AlterableValue called MaxHealth_
When damage is delivered ( through a Collission or Overlap event ), subtract from Enemies Health_

Event Editor, do 3 Events:

If number of HealthBars is lower than number of Enemies
--> Create HealthBar at 0,0

If number of HealthBars is greater than number of Enemies
+ Pic a HealthBar at random
--> Destroy HealthBar

Allways
--> Set HealthBar possition to Enemy possition
--> Set HealthBar maxValue to Enemy MaxHealth_
--> Set HealthBar value to Enemy Health_

[Jacob]

You should do the above, but for future reference, MMF won't duplicate identical images in its cache. Even if they belong to completely different objects, it will only store it once.

[Puff_N_Stuff]

Give all your Character/ Enmy Objects an AlterableValue called Health_
Give all your Character/ Enmy Objects an AlterableValue called MaxHealth_
When damage is delivered ( through a Collission or Overlap event ), subtract from Enemies Health_

Event Editor, do 3 Events:

If number of HealthBars is lower than number of Enemies
--> Create HealthBar at 0,0

If number of HealthBars is greater than number of Enemies
+ Pic a HealthBar at random
--> Destroy HealthBar

Allways
--> Set HealthBar possition to Enemy possition
--> Set HealthBar maxValue to Enemy MaxHealth_
--> Set HealthBar value to Enemy Health_

Thanks for the help, I will try this tomorrow and report back

[Puff_N_Stuff]

Wow, that is great to know. Thanks.