Health Meter Toolkit - All your health meter needs

[CCubbage]

I generally don't need help with logic, so I'll throw out my general feeling of this.

Excellent. The logic is clean and makes sense, your tutorial should help quite a few creators get a handle on some more complex concepts of logic. I would say you know your stuff pretty well.

Now.... health meter without death is futile. You need to put it in a level where the player is running around screaming with tons of little monsters after him.

[damaz10]

Really good tutorial, easy to understand and not too complicated, also the areas where you can demo the logic are a nice touch as well. Nice clean look. which is a good thing for tutorials. Hearted and will check out the logic when I can!

[pivottt]

Thanks! I wasn't sure about the new tutorial. I also was in a rush at the end when making the test room. I might re-publish later with a 4-player test minigame. I don't know why I keep doing it, but I always end up publishing too soon. (lol, I worked 6 months on this before publishing the first version ^^)

[JustinArt]

Thanks for the feedback of Cybernetic Adventures Omega. That's a pretty useful level. It has ways to use a health meter, and the tutorial is well described. I think some areas of the level could use some decorations and additional materials to make the level look better. Great job on the tools. I will use them in the future just to see how it goes.
VISUALS: 3.5/5
SOUND: 4/5
GAMEPLAY: 4/5
OVERALL: A yay

[pivottt]

Thanks, you are the 250th player to my level! I guess I could add some decorations since I've been asked for this multiple times. And I guess I could get some points by making a game with the toolkit to show it to the players! Thanks for noticing the music ^^ It took hours to reproduce this part of the Popcorn song. I think I'll make a Pokemon game soon. I just have to! Unless there are too many good ones out online allready.

[LittleBigDave]

Hey Pivottt, THANKS!! This is really excellent work. Very polished and user friendly and soooo helpful!

I haven't read this whole thread, so apologies if this is repeated feedback...

Some notes say something like "set the timer to correspond..." but I found it a little hard to be sure which timer was being referred to. I will hunt down specific examples if you like. I rememeber the digit segment display being one.

I don't see canned support for detecting multiple simultaneous projectiles when some might have different damage strengths. It looks to me like with the current logic, 3 bullets and a grenade hitting you at once would be registered as 4 grenades when using the projectile handling. This is easy enough to address given all your ground work (different color channels and adding signals), but if you're looking for suggestions for further enhancement, that might be one.

And lastly another suggestion might be support for a hologram health bar that combines segments and fading. So if I want to use a bar to represent health, and I don't want to use a timer/counter for it, I might use a bunch of pieces of sticker panel or holo sections side by side. But there's a limit to the practicality of that I'd think, so maybe I only want to use 5 or 6 or 10 pieces, but for each piece I want to use the dimmer setting to fade it out slowly as that range of health is lost. I've built such a thing now (again, thanks to all your ground work) but the idea in general seems like something that might find a place in the HUD section. I'm happy to share my design, though I'd not be surprised if you could come up with better.

And once again, Thanks! I really appreciate all the work you put into making and sharing this.

[fly_4_a_jedi]

The hud thing you described is in the kit. I don't remember the name, but I know there are two versions. They take a signal and split it into 10 (it is the biggest chip other than probe logic). If you were to use the limiter you can make max health 60, then use the signal thing connected to hologram material. If you want me to show you what I mean I should be on sometime tomorrow.

[LittleBigDave]

The hud thing you described is in the kit. I don't remember the name, but I know there are two versions. They take a signal and split it into 10 (it is the biggest chip other than probe logic). If you were to use the limiter you can make max health 60, then use the signal thing connected to hologram material. If you want me to show you what I mean I should be on sometime tomorrow.

Thanks fly, for the feedback and offer to help, and thanks for your contributions to the kit too, I saw your name on a few things. It's really a nice kit.

I saw the chips you mentioned, but if I understand correctly they round the health signal into one of 10 levels, so I can get yes/no as to if the player's health is in the 50's (or, with the other chip, 50's or higher), but I can't use it for gradual dimming of that health segment holo as health drops from, say, 59 down to 51. (I'm actually more interested in a slow heal over time effect, but same idea.) Or maybe it does this and I just missed it?? I was leaving max health at 100 and routing multiple ranges (like 50's & 60's) into one holo so maybe I just butchered the signal. In any case I've got it working now for my own purposes, and if the kit doesn't already have this and you want to see what I mean, I'm happy to meet up to show you some time.

[LittleBigDave]

Regarding the projectile handling, if I understand correctly, there's currently a known limitation when two player/objects are near each other (within the bullet.damage tag sensor radius). If one gets hit, they both register damage. Could this not be avoided by sub-chiping the bullet.damage tag sensor stuff on the projectile target chip and then having that sub chip activated only by an additional impact sensor that checks for collision with a bullet.damage tag? This way, I'd think, only the player/object that was touched would register damage, and one close by but behind it wouldn't tag sense the bullet.damage.

[fly_4_a_jedi]

I do agree with the bullet tag thing, we would just need to use a pulse to accept the damage, but really I have never used that tool so I don't know exactly what it does.

For the dimming you can just connect the current health to a piece of hologram, and use the other tool in conjunction by using and gates. This will check to see if the piece is on, and it will pass the percent through.

[fly_4_a_jedi]

Idea: for the bullet thing use impact sensors on the bullet, and you can use that to see which player it is colliding with. Whenever a player is impacted it turns on a tag to send a signal to the player it hit only (using different color tags). We could use the same collector, just adjust the tag colors.

I can show this, and try to get it in the kit, however the creator does not like using many tags.

[LittleBigDave]

It looks to me like with the current logic, 3 bullets and a grenade hitting you at once would be registered as 4 grenades when using the projectile handling.

I was wrong about this. The kit works fine for this as is, and in fact the simplicity and accuracy of this handling of different damage strengths (simultaneous hits from bullets and grenades) is one of the best things about this area of the kit IMO.

ASIDE: My confusion was based on my misunderstanding of how tag sensors requiring multiple tags handle analog values. They don't just return the strongest tag signal in range (as the wiki had led me to think - now corrected). If they are set to require N tags, they will return the analog value of the Nth strongest tag in range. So a sensor requiring 3 tags, when in range of four tags with signals of 10%,20%,30%,40%, would return 20%. That's a pretty nifty bit of built-in logic in the tag sensor!

[LittleBigDave]

Idea: for the bullet thing use impact sensors on the bullet, and you can use that to see which player it is colliding with. Whenever a player is impacted it turns on a tag to send a signal to the player it hit only (using different color tags). We could use the same collector, just adjust the tag colors.

I can show this, and try to get it in the kit, however the creator does not like using many tags.

The thing with player-specific channels (if I understood you correctly), is that you have to keep all the separate color-specific logic sorted and updated. And it gets even harder if we're talking about damage taken by 50 bad guys instead of 4 players. To address the same concern, I'm finding it pretty easy to just use an impact sensor on the player, in addition to the one of the bullet. So bullet detects impact and broadcasts damage value (per the kit), and now player simultaneously detects impact and is only then listening for damage values in that frame. The listening ranges are very short of course, so the only time this can cause a problem is if two players are very close together and both being hit in the same frame. (So both are listening to all bullets in range, including some that hit the other player.) Even then, a bullet would only incorrectly damage the additional player if it impacted pretty much between the two players, given the short listening range for bullet damage on either player. And bullets from bad guys might never impact right between two close together players, they'd typically hit a player on the outer side not shielded by the other player. (Unless the players are shooting each other!) So far I'm happy with this behavior, especially as it adds minimal additional logic to my increasingly bloated circuit boards. :-P

[pivottt]

Nice, I were hoping for feedback on this sensor. It was built to make sure that getting hit by multiple projectiles at the same frame works. Problem is you would need to have a multiplier on each damage chip and multiple damage sensors to trigger the multipliers (so detecting 3 impacts with bullet.10 would deal 3 times 10% damage). Off course, that would be really long and painful to build. So I though, how could I use fewer tags. And then there came the idea of having one tag and place the damage chip inside the projectile. I just used a similar logic in the "goodies giver", in misc logic category of the Health chip. However, I didn't use multiple sensors, as I don't think you will collect multiple health packs. If the player is, let's say, a dragon or a giant snake, the projectile system becomes useless, since the radius would need to be way to big. But for sackbots, it's not a big problem.

I'm glad you liked it. I had to work so much on understanding how those sensors worked. I even found out something while working. If you want to know which object is the closest to you, you can use a tag sensor set to proximity on all objects and one on you. Then you have to transmit the proximity you receive through another tag. Then all objects detect that signal's strength and compare it with the one from the proximity sensor. If the distance between A and closest to A is equal to distance between B and A, then B is closest to A. I just liked it that you detected proximity of an object and sent it back to the object. Fun with sensors ^^

EDIT : haha, fly_4_a_jedi is right, I do prefer using as few as I can. That's what I hate when I find logic online, when they give names like "health", "fire" or "jump". Don't use common words, use complex ones you are sure nobody used, like "hmt_health", "bullet_fire" or "player1.jump". I like to use _ instead of spaces, and "." to show ownership, just like in programming.

[LittleBigDave]

Awesome stuff. I fully agree about verbose tag names and funny you should meantion your use of "." as that particularly pleased me as well. (I had been doing the same here lol - I'm a programmer as well - and it makes it so much easier to find the right label in my list later too.) I really think the biggest shortcoming of your kit is the bland advert for it in your signature. This level should be getting more plays me thinks.

I also like your idea about proximity checks using the tag sensor, and funnily enough I was actually just having "fun with sensors" in that area myself. Your idea could also be used to identify the 2nd closest, 3rd closest, etc, since the closeness mode follows similar behavior to signal strength mode, and that could be help some fun game play (like the second closest player to the boss takes damage over time, so players have to keep resorting themselves to have a chance to heal! Ha!) However the downside of closeness mode, and the bit I was actually just playing with, is that it seems like the sensor scales it's 0-100% output over the distance of 100% R (R=Radius) down to 25% R. Once a tag is within 25% R, the sensor redlines at 100%. So let's call this first sensor S1 with a range of R1. I want to add a second tag sensor S2 whose range R2 = 25% R1. And then if we could do the math of S = (75% * S1) + (25% * S2), I think this S value would be a much more accurate sense of the distance within the overall range R1, even within 25% R1. The thing is I'm not yet sure of an efficient way to perform this formula in LBP2 logic. Perhaps you have an idea? Also, it would still redline at 100% anywhere within 6% of R1, but you could possibly add a third sensor to improve upon that still, with R3 = 25% * R2, and S = (75% * S1) + (18.75% * S2) + (6.25% * S3), and then be accurate down to 2%. I think.

Also, regarding the projectile sensor system you made, is there any reason not to have the target sensing impact as well, and only activating the damage tag sensors in the frame in which it senses an impact? So this way both projectile and target "handshake" via mutually detected impacts, and only then does the damage get recorded. This seems to me to have potential to greatly reduce the false positive readings when target sensor ranges overlap. Situations like the long snake target seem less problematic then. Even without that, couldn't a snake have multiple projectile target sensors (your chip) along it, with non-overlapping coverage, and just add up the sensed damage? (Rather than one chip in the snake's mid-section with a giant radius.)

[LittleBigDave]

Regarding my last post about getting more accurate readings with closesness mode on tag sensors, I ended up using Pivottt's division chip (also part of this increasingly handy health counter tool kit) to achieve what I wanted, and it worked great. However it's a bit complicated, and I then realized that if I just set the minimum distance to 0.1 the sensor output properly scales over the entire range! It doesn't "redline" at 100% upon reaching within 25% of the max range setting like it does with minimum = 0.0. The only downside now is that within 0.1, it would output 0% (aka Off), so a second sensor with min = 0.0 and max range = 0.2 (not just 0.1) and OR'd with the first sensor, takes care of this.

[pivottt]

True, I had to use the 0.1 trick with sensors in the past. I lost you in the S1 times R2 and whatever... I'm in a hurry, so I can't take the time to get it for now. The divide chip was given to me by evret - though he was building it by memory, so I ended up looking at rtm's blog to fix it, and I then made it work with negatives. It's sad that it lags with loads of numbers because of timers, but at least we can divide by 10 using division by 90 so I'm happy. As for the sign, the older ones were prettier, using Portal textures and images, but the bad quality of this site's signature image hosting made it all blurry. I'll make a new one soon, using my own font! Yeah, I made a font!

EDIT : I made a new sigpic, but uploaded it to imageshack and it makes a way better quality file. Not a massive change, but it looks less... rushed ? Since I have time, I'll try to understand what you meant... Oh, I get it. Unfortunately, the only way to multiply by fractions seemed to be using physical solutions, so it's not precise. You don't need a 0 to 0.2 sensor, I guess your character is bigger than this, unless when dealing with hologram stuff. For the projectile logic not handshaking... I just thought it was a big too much, I mean there's a delay for every confirmation and I thought "if someone wants to be that precise, they are probably intelligent enough to build one". :P Remember that when I started this project, it was only because nobody talked about feedback-loops-based health meters. I never planned making it THIS big, it was supposed to be just one chip in the Creator's Toolkit. But it grew so much that I thought "hey, this should be a toolkit instead of a built system, so they can build their own with it." Then I made more and more chips, discovered comphermc's tutorial about feedback loops, restarted the whole logic with it (it worked with counters back then ^^) and then published it. That's more than a year ago!

[LittleBigDave]

So yeah, my S1 and R1 business was wasteful overkill. I just didn't realize until after that that weird behavior with tag sensors hitting 100% at 1/4 range was only for 0.0 setting. 0.1 is a much better workaround. I wasn't using holo but I did have the sensor and tag converging in different planes, so I needed the additional 0.2 sensor. (Otherwise I agree it's not needed.)

I made a new sigpic

Looks better! If I'm honest I'd say the small text is a little hard to read, at least with the white on orange. And I think the link text area of the sig should work as a link, if that's possible. Don't mean to nitpick, just want the kit to get clicks.

For the projectile logic not handshaking... I just thought it was a big too much, I mean there's a delay for every confirmation

Not sure what you mean by delay for every confirmation? I'm sure you have a better understanding here than I do, but in my limited fiddling, it seemed like a bullet impact sensor on the target chip was all I needed to avoid nearly all false positives when two targets were near each other during a bullet hit. The mutual impact between target and bullet happens in same frame.

But yeah, I understand you don't want to bloat the kit. I'm just throwing out ideas because I'm interested in this stuff and excited to have your kit to play with!

[pivottt]

I don't have the kit in front of me, so I can't say about the projectile thing.
As for the signature, there's two ways to make an image there
1) Using SIGPIC - bad quality, allows links
2) Using an image host - better quality, doesn't allow links
I wanted to use html to make the area of the link clickable, but html isn't allowed here.

Here, I inverted the pictures - well I just remade them actually
Left one is hosted, less text so it's nice for the eyes. Right one is a SIGPIC, so the quality is hurt a bit, and I said "click here" so people click on this part :P

EDIT : I just learnt about IMGLINK tag instead of IMG tag, which allows links on images.

[LittleBigDave]

Nice! I fully appreciate the extremes you go to to achieve the results you're after.