(V1.0 NOW OUT) lifeCountPlus.lua: Improved life counters

[The Dwarven Digger]

Have you ever thought that having 99 lives just isn't enough for you?
Have you ever played with a friend, and disliked the way SMBX combines player life totals?
With lifeCountPlus.lua, those problems are a thing of the past!

Features

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lifeCountPlus.lua allows extra customisable life counters, with options such as:

• Customisable number of displayed digits (1-10, 3 max recommended). Affects maximum possible lives.
• Option to enable the crowns system as featured in newer Mario games, allowing up to 11,111,111,110 lives!
• Option for player head icons on life counter instead of standard "1-up" symbol.
• Infinite lives option at max lives, with or without an infinity symbol.
• Life total separation by player
• Life total separation by character
• Life total separation by character and player

Screenshots

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How to use

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Insert this line into lunaworld.lua and lunaoverworld.lua (Using both enables overworld compatibility):

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local lifeCountPlus = API.load("lifeCountPlus")

That's it for basic set-up! For customisation, you can add some of the following (shown are default values):

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lifeCountPlus.doCrowns = true -- Enables/disables crowns system

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lifeCountPlus.maxInfinite = false -- Enables infinite lives when you reach the maximum

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lifeCountPlus.showInfinite = true -- Shows infinity symbol when at infinite lives

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lifeCountPlus.doHeads = true -- Shows player heads next to life count

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lifeCountPlus.separatePlayers = true -- Separates player life totals

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lifeCountPlus.separateCharacters = true -- Separates character life totals

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lifeCountPlus.showZero = true -- Shows special symbol for 0 lives

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lifeCountPlus.starReward = true -- Gives the player a star at certain intervals of lives. SET TO FALSE IF NOT USING 2.0

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lifeCountPlus.starInterval = 100 -- Sets the interval for the star reward

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lifeCountPlus.setDigits(3) -- Sets number of digits for life counter.

Please note that lifeCountPlus.lua overrides the standard SMBX life counter.
Accessing the standard memory offset directly will not work correctly while this library is in use.
Use only with whole episodes or stand-alone levels.
If you need to access or alter a player's life total, use one of the following functions:

• lifeCountPlus.setLives(x, player index) for setting lives to a specific value
• lifeCountPlus.addLives(x, player index) for adding lives
• lifeCountPlus.removeLives(x, player index) for removing lives
• lifeCountPlus.getLives(player index) to get a player's current life total

If player index is not provided, it will default to player 1.

Requires imagic.lua and pnpc.lua, both of which are included with SMBX 2.0 Beta 3.

Download Here!

[aero]

I took a look at this and it may take quite a while to get an understanding of what you're doing in order to make the right changes. It'd be easier to help if you used expressive variable names instead of names like "num", "aNumber", "bNumber", "plr", and so on. I see you have comments throughout your code; this is also somewhere you could make things more expressive to where comments would be unnecessary. Also your if statements could be better encapsulated.

[PixelPest]

A few comments without reiterating any of the above which I second, however I will note that when writing mathematical functions, variables aren't usually too descriptive, however aNumber and bNumber are unnecessarily verbose, and a and b (though personally I'd go with a or b and x. You'll get more used to this as you look more at other people's code and write some yourself, however there are generally accepted abbreviations/ways to abbreviate things. You don't have to try and shorten the crap out of things, for example 'char' is often used as a short form for 'character' and is only one letter longer than 'chr' but much clearer and obvious. Similar with 'plr', as a parameter name I'd honestly go with 'p' which I think is a little more obvious and often used to shorten 'player' in LunaLua, especially since 'player' is a global constant already. You also consistently spell 'separate' which I thought I'd mention.

• It would be worth making a number of the variables part of the API table, such as the images, so that people can use their own without modifying the provided files.
• Please don't rename the default events. It makes it a lot harder to understand what's going on especially since some of the names of them aren't that accurate. It isn't immediately easy to distinguish between a new function and a LunaLua event going through the code and I don't see any real reason to do what you did there.
• I'm confused by the purpose of the exp function you wrote. There's no reason for it to exist (I'm on my mobile IDE but it looks like you only have one particular application of it) and you could simply write 10 ^ digits.
• Please use proper naming conventions for your functions (i.e. Update should be update). On a separate note I see no reason to have that function separate (the code inside it could easily just be written in the event), and you should tend to define your local variables and functions all together at the top instead of intermingling them with events

[Quantumenace]

Fireballs activate onNPCKill when they hit; you could keep track of those.

[The Dwarven Digger]

From testing I've found that if one player is dead or not touching the ground in 2 player mode, that player will gain 1-ups from Yoshi eggs (npc 96) breaking. This seems to be linked to the player's kill combo that's used for stomping enemies, since that resets when the player is on the ground, but despite ignoring npc-96 in the onNPCKill event, the player still gains 1-ups (and 2-ups). Any idea what could be causing this? The only way such a combo could be affected like this is through the onNPCKill event, so is this event triggered for the egg breaking using a different NPC id?

[CheesyYoY]

is there screenshots?

[Quantumenace]

By the way, they're working on a lua event for beta 4 that detects when an NPC takes damage. I don't know whether it can tell what player/object caused the damage though.

[The Dwarven Digger]

By the way, they're working on a lua event for beta 4 that detects when an NPC takes damage. I don't know whether it can tell what player/object caused the damage though.

Sounds like it might help fix the egg issue, but idk how the game handles the egg breaking, since it doesn't appear to go through onNPCKill. Might still be useful elsewhere though.

is there screenshots?

I was going to add some when I reach an "official release" point where I've ironed out as many of the major bugs as possible, but I can put some on here now if you wish.

[The Dwarven Digger]

Version 1.0 is finally released! Took about a month working on and off to get all the bugs ironed out, but it's all completed now! Check OP for details.

[TheNightingale]

This looks very useful!

[lan vuhoang]

The life counter don't decrease when you dies. Now I always have infinite lives.

[Cedur]

So I want to play a few episodes with 3-digit lives using this script, but I got error messages. I copied it into the world folder and wrote

Spoiler: show

local lifeCountPlus = API.load("lifeCountPlus")

lifeCountPlus.setDigits(3)

Since it says that "imagic" and "pnpc" are required, I copied these into the folder too. Am I missing something?

[Lusho]

You don't need to copy them into the folder, they just get loaded, even thought PNPC is deprecated so you should remove it, Enjl has a tutorial on how to do it, also, it has the same weird problem that NSMBWalls had with the DrawBox thing, i think i have a fixed version but i don't know where.

BTW, it's better to use require rather than API.load right?

[SPEEDIE]

It looks kind of blurry in Beta 4, why could this be?

[Lusho]

Thats because of imagic stuff, i know that in nsmbwalls forum there is a fix, since both of them had the same problem, take a look at the replies.
viewtopic.php?f=101&t=18037

[lan vuhoang]

Update this, especially since Beta 4 is released and SMBX2 Final is in development.
Also, fix the bug with the life counter not decreasing that I reported earlier and the loading bugs.
Also also, pnpc is outdated and isn't included with Beta 4, so find some way to not require it.

[Cedur]

too bad the author hasn't been online for a few months. I'd also wish to know how to make this work!

[Lusho]

I mean i kind of got it, but i dont know if posting a fix without permission is even allowed, i just removed everything related to imagic and pnpc, and then hid the life counter with hudoverride.

[JamesR624]

I mean i kind of got it, but i dont know if posting a fix without permission is even allowed, i just removed everything related to imagic and pnpc, and then hid the life counter with hudoverride.

How did you do that exactly? It seems imagic is a major part of the code. Did you replace all instances with something else or?

[Cedur]

Dunno if I'm understanding this right but what was the point of hiding the life counter when the point of this script is to enable 3-digit lives?