Health UI: Adding a health bar

 Author Patrick Kelly

Date 10/14/2022

The problem I ran into while working on Island Defenders was implementing a blueprint that would update a progress bar for player health on their heads up display. I was trying to get a reference to the player actor and using it’s health to update a progress bar to display player health to the player. The issue I ran into was getting a reference into the blueprint widget. Even with that issue, the other problem is when the player gets hurt, the blueprint widget would never receive the update for player health changing.

I created a widget blueprint that used a custom event that would take an input zero to one value to update the progress bar. Eliminating the extra steps from the UI grabbing the player and binding health updates and having to take in max health to produce a proper zero to one value. From there, in the player controller, I placed an add to viewport call on the health bar and bound the health bar update event to the player’s take damage event. With this, the player was now able to see their health as they took damage.

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