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 your graphic card's current updates per second, so you will never see an update number higher than that value.

As discussed in the Motion Smoothness Dialog section below, the program is geared to match the size of the critters' simulation time steps so that the critters take the same time to cross the game world irregardless of how fast your computer runs.

When you open a menu, the status bar shows a tip about the currently highlighted menu selection.