LifeCounter

#1 Section 4 of the asteroids tutorial covers adding a life counter to the game, although it displays 1 ship for each life left. Doing something like you suggested would probably be even simpler than what the tutorial shows, as long as you have the graphics prepared beforehand in a single imageMap and you're just swapping frames. If you want to do it all within the takes damage behavior that should be possible, just add a behavior field where you can link the sprite of the life display and tell it within the kill function to swap frames, as you proposed.

#2 I can't seem to get it to work.
1. I put the imagemap on the screen that I want to display the lives
2.I added this in the behavior

%template.addBehaviorField(image, " This is the image used to display player lives", object, "", t2dImageMapDatablock);

3. Then in the kill function I added setImageMap(%this.image, 3);

function TakesDamageBehavior::kill(%this)
{
 
   if (%this.lives <= 0)
   {
      setImageMap(%this.image, 3);
      %this.owner.safeDelete();
      return;
      
   }
   
   %this.invincible = true;
   %this.owner.visible = false;
   %this.owner.collisionActiveReceive = false;
   %this.schedule(%this.respawnTime * 1000, "spawn");
}

#3 Few mistakes here.

First of all, if you are dragging an imageMap into your scene then it's probably a t2dStaticSprite. So change the behavior field to t2dStaticSprite or t2dSceneObject. Also, for it to show up in the TGB editor behavior field you need to give the sprite a name in the scripting rollout under the edit tab.

Then in the kill function you are only trying to change frame when the ship has no lives left. If this is what you intend, the function should be more like this:

function TakesDamageBehavior::kill(%this)
{
 
   if (%this.lives <= 0)
   {
      %this.image.setFrame(3);
      %this.owner.safeDelete();
      return;
      
   }
   
   %this.invincible = true;
   %this.owner.visible = false;
   %this.owner.collisionActiveReceive = false;
   %this.schedule(%this.respawnTime * 1000, "spawn");
}

#4 [RESOLVED]
THANKS. This worked. I just changed code a little to change for decrement of all lives.