Software Engineering and Computer Games

The status bar

The standard status bar displays the player’s score, the player’s health, the total number of non-bullet critters in the game (including the player critter if one is present), and the number of updates per second that your machine is currently doing for the animation.

For some games such as Airhockey, the player health information is not useful, as in those games the player’s health is always the same.

As was mentioned in the Updates Per Second section, the updates per second number is a rolling average over a period of time, so it will take a while for this number to stabilize when you do some change to the current game – such as changing the number or the types of the critters. The program is designed not to demand more than ...