How would I monitor and display the characters' oxygen while underwater?

[CCShakeCat]

I want to add a mechanic into the game where the player can see how much air the character has. How can I add such a feature?

Each sprite on the sheet is 16x16

And here is a preview of how I am aiming for it to look

[r6915ee]

I believe that the variable specifying the time before the player drowns is airTimer in Player.gd which should be set to around 30 seconds in the source code, and the water variable ALSO in Player.gd tells whether or not the player is underwater or not. Those should be the two variables you want to worry about.

[r6915ee]

Does the timer simply still keep going, or does it just stop?

As for the color palette, I am not entirely sure what causes the issue. I've never really dealt with color palettes in the framework myself so I'm not sure.

[CCShakeCat]

The timer keeps ticking down. If I were to collect a bubble when it says "15", it will not reset to 30, but instead continuing down to 14, so on so forth

[r6915ee]

Air bubbles in Worlds Next directly modify the player's airTimer to be equivalent to the player's defaultAirTime in the newest version, with the latter being set to 30 seconds. The timer should at the very least account for this because it directly checks the airTimer value, and has 30 seconds subtracted by the variables. Do air bubbles do nothing in your version of the framework, in that case (as in, the airTimer remains unchanged for whatever reason)?

[CCShakeCat]

No, the timer definitely gets reset, seeing as the timer reaches 0 while Sonic is still under water. Though now that I think about it, could it be because the countdown is an animation? If so, is there another way to count the time down other than with an Animation track

[r6915ee]

I do not think that should be the case. Sprite2Ds are particularly limited in their animation capabilities and only provide frame-related values. The script changes the current frame directly each time it processes. The current frame is affected by airTimer directly to some capacity because it subtracts 30 by airTimer.

[DimensionWarped]

Create a node within the player object. Position that node so that it is always near the player's head. Leave it visible for now.

Create a sprite and an animation. You should probably already know how to make a sprite have different frames at this point. Add a script that sets the frame of this animation every frame. Set it based to numFrames * (1 - (player[x].airTimer / player[x].defaultAirTime)) -- that formula should make it so that if it's full (30 / 30), it sets it to frame 0 and if it's empty (0 / 30), it sets it to frame 30.

You might need to adjust that psuedocode above to use the parented player object or something. Minor details.

When the player exits the water, set a timer that will either fade the timer ui to transparent or else just make it disappear immediately depending on your taste.

When the player enters the water, make the ui element visible, clear any timer based removals you might have.

Since you have added some complexity to the animation in the last ten seconds of the timer, you'll want to change it to an animation player probably and manually keyframe it to change the frames yourself and just use the following formula to set the time scale of the animation player instead:

1 - (player[x].airTimer / player[x].defaultAirTime)

Which gives you a value of 0 when the player's air time is full and 1 when the player's air time is empty.

FWIW, it might actually make more sense to make your animation programmatically rather than with a bunch of sprites, but that's another topic.

[CCShakeCat]

An Update to this:

I have decided to message the countdown into more of a hard-coded thing. Can anyone help with the process and help make it reset upon collecting a bubble and pause when, well, pausing the game?

[r6915ee]

If you have already made specific changes since the last few posts, then what does the script currently look like?

[CCShakeCat]

I have not yet made changes beside at 12, the meter gets bigger and centers itself with the text GET AIR showing up flashing red, controlled by the StartTimer animation.

I will add the preview when I can. I just downgraded my pc to Windows 10 and I am still trying to set up the backup I have (Google Drive is just taking a while)

[r6915ee]

If you're using an AnimationPlayer node for said animation through the play() method, then I believe that instead of simply using the play() method and nothing else, you can add a usage of the stop() method before the play() method to effectively restart the animation.