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autoBossBar

autoBossBar adds an automated, highly configurable Boss Bar. When a powerful hostile NPC is present in the map, all players will see its name and healthbar displayed at the top of the screen. The Boss Bar responds to changes in health instantly for all clients, using carefully optimized networking. True to its name, autoBossBar is designed to do its work completely automatically - no need to shoot the enemy with the Tool Gun or tell the addon which entities are considered bosses, it'll handle it all for you.

Features include:

• The Boss Bar shows up automatically when an enemy with at least 100 hitpoints spawns on the map, displaying the name and health of the strongest such enemy.
  
• The Boss Bar's width scales dynamically based on the maximum health of the boss, using a precisely tuned mathematical function to accommodate a massive range of health pools while also ensuring stronger enemies have noticeably longer, extra menacing healthbars.
  
• The enemy's health can be displayed numerically underneath the Boss Bar.
  
• The Boss Bar is for enemies. Only NPCs who are hostile towards at least one player will be shown, so you don't have to deal with friendly NPCs appearing on it.
  
• Reprioritization: Attacking a boss will assign its name and health to the Boss Bar, even if there's a stronger boss still alive. This means that if you're fighting multiple bosses at once, whichever one you've attacked most recently will have its health shown, rather than only ever showing you the stronger boss's health.
  
• Healthbar Mode: If enabled, attacking any enemy will put its information on the Boss Bar, even if it isn't strong enough to be put there normally.
  
• As an extra touch of polish, some Half Life 2 enemies will be processed as though they were stronger or weaker than they actually are, to deal with some anomalies in health pool sizes. Measuring by raw numbers, a Ceiling Turret actually has ten times as much health as a Combine Gunship - but this feature makes it so the Gunship will be prioritized as the powerful foe it is, and the Ceiling Turret won't steal the spotlight.
  
• All of these features can be fully configured and disabled if desired. Configuration options are separated into client-side and server-side options in the Utilities menu.

autoBossBar prioritizes readability while also including some stylish details. When an enemy takes a lot of damage, the lost health will drain away with a fancy animation - the draining part of the healthbar is colored differently, so not only can you see exactly how big a chunk you've bitten off, but it also lets you see its real moment-to-moment health at a glance. When the currently tracked boss dies, the Boss Bar gets a moment to fade out dramatically before being automatically assigned to a new boss, if one exists. And the name displayed on the Boss Bar doesn't just use the NPC's class, but instead gets its name from the spawnlist - so, for example, instead of "npc_antlionguard", it will show as "Antlion Guard".

When using W L K R E's phenomenal Metroid Prime SWEP, the bossbar will take on the appearance of boss healthbars in Metroid Prime, to perfectly suit the Power Suit's custom HUD. If you're combining these two mods, you might also be interested in my Prime Pickups from NPCs addon and perhaps also Prime Trilogy Controls for an extra-enhanced Metroid Prime combat experience.

Please let me know what you think! I hope this is useful for your NPC-fighting needs.