This method would work perfectly! I mean, I was thinking about something like this (I forgot a about the rectfill function though). But the reason I didn't do so was because I was worried that it wasn't the most straightforward or efficient method. Is there anything else that would be more efficient? If there is I have no clue what it would be.

Thank you for your help!

EDIT: Oooh, making it look glassy would be neat!

When the game is COMPLETELY finished (meaning, I have no clue when I would get to this) I want to only redraw sections of the screen that need to be redrawn. So... would that change anything?

Let's say that you have 10 health bar 'boxes' to indicate health.

If the player gets hit once, does an entire health 'box' disappear, or does it only fill part of the way?

[x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] // full health
[x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [ ] // hit once (last one is empty)

...or...
[x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [/] // hit once, only 1/2 of last bar is filled

If these will simply be "10 hits" and the player is dead, you can simply loop from 0..9 and print the health 'box' next to each other (with a small offset for the gap between then).

Otherwise, you will want to use rectfill() or similar, like Thomas suggested, and fill up the each 'box' the appropriate amount (1/2 per box, or even 1/10th so 10 boxes of 10 gives a total of 100% health).

A profiler is a special tool that measures the time each of your function takes. If you're using MinGW then you compile your sources with the -pg flag, run your program and then use gprof to analyze the profiling log produced by your program (when a program compiled with -pg is run, it produces a file called a.out, which contains the profiling information).

>mingw32-g++ -Wall -O2 -pg -o main.exe main.cpp -Wl,--subsystem,windows
>main.exe
>gprof a.out > main_profile.txt
>type main_profile.txt

Express doesn't include a profiler.

If you like a good IDE, that is free and has a profile, I recommend netbeans.

Netbeans and MS visual Studio are the best IDEs that I have used as far as interpreting the source code goes (such as correctly colouring and fading pasts based on macro definitions in conditional compilation blocks and the like). I use Visual Stuodio 2010 Express wit the win7 sdk 7.2 for 64bit pe compilation support on windows 7, and netbeans on archlinux (I do profiling and debugging mostly on linux but I further develop the same code on both platforms interchangeably because the IDEs are of the same high tier AFAIC).

Either that or +1 to trying very sleepy

But seriously I slightly prefer netbeans' interface and it has a heap usage profiler visible by default while it is running your program. Just create a makefile project with it and write your own Makefiles, that's what I do. The only project configuration I do in netbeans beyond telling it to call my makefile is telling it which preprocessor defines I have as active by default so I can see my code as it will usually compile.

You GOTTA have Visual Assist X for Visual Studio. Otherwise, you shouldn't be using Visual Studio . Really; it makes that much of a difference.

I've been doing all of my programming in a regular text editor that at least supports regular expression Search And Replace. Then, I've just compiled my projects from the command line. I know that it isn't very efficient, but it makes more sense to me. Then when I really need to work in an IDE that builds for me, I actually know what's going on "behind the scenes" and I can troubleshoot any errors that surface.

Netbeans IS awesome, although it's a bit slower. But it's almost the top performer for context-sensitive code completion.

I just wanted to say that I disagree with this 100%. Always write code with efficiency in mind.

Have you ever complained about Flash sucking? It's because the programmer who wrote that particular applet was not thinking about efficiency.

My gut feeling is you're doing OK and you're not going to have too many problems with efficiency, so don't worry.

When it comes to Flash, I think there are plenty of things Macromedia could have done to encourage people to write efficient code. If you design an editor for artists and then expect them to have the approach that an experienced old-school programmer would have, you're doing it wrong.

filling a rectangle is a bit ugly. Why not create yourself a decent image in a paint program then crop the image based on the health level onto the target buffer.