Efficient Health Bar

Questions & Answers
1

I implemented the Health Bar solution found here: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/4456 for health bars. The problem is, once I get 4 or 5 instances of the health bars on the screen the frames per second is down a good amount.

For a single bar it might be fine, but for a larger number it doesn't appear to be viable. Any recommendations?

Edit: Found a code problem which helped... but I still wonder if there is a quicker way to draw the bars.

2

Calling OnGUI from multiple objects might be the culprit. Try assembling a group of healthbars into an array and only having one handler object run OnGUI over those objects.

Something like this pair - Create exactly one Healthbars object and any number of LivingThing objects.

LivingThing.js

var health : float;
var maxhealth : float;

function Start() {
  Healthbars.AddBar( this );
}

Healthbars.js

static var healthbars : Array();
static var instance : Healthbars;

function Start() {    
  if ( instance ) throw ("Duplicate Healthbars instance: " + gameObject.name );
  instance = this;
}

static function AddBar( lt : LivingThing ) {
  healthbars.Add( lt );
}

function OnGUI() {
 for ( var lt : LivingThing in healthbars ) {
   // display code goes here
 }
}