Health Bar

If there is only one actor/health bar, then you can use the technique described here. If you have multiple actors, each with their own health bar, you can use a variation on that technique. Each actor will need to maintain a reference to the health bar: You will need to initialise the field so that it points to an appropriate health bar. An easy way to do this is have the actor create the health bar in the actor's constructor: Then you will be able to call methods on the health bar from the actor:

i did it slightly different the way i went about it was that I created 4 different images of the health bar for both of my actors respectively. i then created a class as follows: public class MegaHealth extends Actor { public void act() { healthCheck(); } public void healthCheck(int h) { if(h <= 70) setImage("megahealthgreen.gif"); else if(h <=45) setImage("megahealthyellow.gif"); else if(h <=15) setImage("megahealthorange.gif"); else setImage("megahealthred.gif"); } } i intended to create a new HealthBar in each of my actors that would be using it, and pass in their health as the int h. everything in my scenario works fine besides my health bars, this is the error i get when compiling: healthCheck(int) in MegaHealth cannot be applied to () this means..?

You've declared healthCheck as: But when you call it from the constructor, you don't pass any parameter value: ... it needs a parameter value, but you haven't specified it.

okay, so i took the Super Mario scenario created by Donald Duck and did something similar to what he did with the health bar. and it works fine. however remember when i was trying to remove an actor and replace it with another facing the opposite direction? well everytime i make the switch, the health gets reset, and i totally understand why that's happening, but I'm trying to figure out how to avoid it. i need to somehow have my health status at one location as opposed to having it in both classes. . . . . . . . . question: if i have one actor as a subclass to its counterpart, would they be storing their health value in the same location?

No, unless you declare the field as "static", but it's best not to do that if you can avoid it (it's bad from a design point of view). However, you can solve the problem by setting the health level of one actor at the same time as you create it from the other one.