Object Health Stacking: How to Track Inanimate Objects' Health

Community Made Guides
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Ok, we’ve got a bit of a short one today.

Let’s say you’re making giant wars, and you want to keep track of how much health your bed has. You may go to just giving the giant a certain amount of health, say 1000 or something.

That’s great and all, but suddenly you realize that you want to display the giant’s health to other people. How would you do that?

Well, you wouldn’t. Without an ABSURDLY memory-intensive projectile stasis system, you can’t really track when bullets hit. So what do you do instead? Well, you use prop stacking!

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This is our crate. We want to measure its health. Well, we can sorta do that. Now, it’s not perfect, but it’s WAY easier than the alternative.

First, we need to set the health of the crate to 1. Then, we set it to broadcast on a channel – let’s say scrap. A property-linked counter is hooked up to channel scrap, and it decrements when it receives. The property will start at 10.

Then, duplicate the crate 10 times and place the duplicates on top of each other.
Now, the ‘singular’ crate can recieve 10 hits before it dies. Voila! You have just created a stacked-health object.

From there, you can hook it up to something like an overlay that tracks health via a progress bar or counting mechanism, or really anything else. This can be used to track the health of sentries, props, and more!

NOTE: You really don’t want to do this with sentries, it will cost you tons of memory. If possible, try to make a situation where props can be placed over the sentry, then track that health instead. It’ll save you SO MUCH MEMORY.
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I need to say this or I’m gonna get flamed, because the culture on this site is wild. No, I was probably not the first person to come up with this. Yes, it’s been brought up before. If you come to the comments saying ‘but i did this first’ you really don’t need to. It doesn’t matter who made it, it just matters that the community has it. However, in this instance, @WhereIsMyHat reminded me about this concept, so props to them. (get it) (props) (thats funny) (why ar en t you laug hin g)

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Also, we should totally make a tag about game mechanics. A lot of guides can be split into things like art or specific game ideas, and there’s tags for all that, but none for something like #mechanic or #core-mechanic or somethin.

(quantum mechanics gang)

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Nice guide!

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This doesn’t take into account quantum portals vs snowball launchers though…

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Great guide! :smile: I really like that it’s easy, and the sentry part!

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Like I said, it’s better than the alternative. It’s not supposed to be an end-all mechanic that fixes the problem of damage tracking permanently. We both know that’s not happening this easily. But it works like it does.

you say it like you have a better idea
if you do what is it
if not no need to tell others their ideas arent good lol

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Wonderful Guide @Shdwy

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I actually do have an idea for this. I call it HARDWARE TIME! Basically, you have a bunch of props that see what angle the player shoots it at and use that to track the sentry’s health.

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How… does that… measure the difference between a launcher and a QP?

or is this a joke and am i just being stupid

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This might be useful…

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After this, I am being stupid.

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Great guide! Also yes lol it was a very punnny joke. As for sentries you can somewhat track their health by the damage color. If it is blue then it is like multiple hits and gold is critical.

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This is no longer reusable bump.

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oh darn it i accidently clicked the check mark