Displaying entity health on client

[shrublake]

I have been fiddling with some entities in Lua on Garry's Mod, (User interaction seems to be very fun to me), and I would like to display the health of the entity that I have defined as self.damage on the server here:

function ENT:OnTakeDamage(dmg)
    self.damage = (self.damage or 100) - dmg:GetDamage()
    if self.damage <= 0 then
            self:Remove()
        end
    end
end

I would now like to display what the entities "damage" (health) is at VIA a draw.SimpleText on the client. I am very new to Lua and this one just stumped me for some reason.

If I missed anything, please let me know.
Any ideas are greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[joeyjumper]

we'll use Entity/SetNWInt to remember the health as well as send it to all clients
and Entity/GetNWInt to retrieve the health.
function ENT:OnTakeDamage(dmg)
local health=self:GetNWInt("health",100) - dmg:GetDamage()--
if health <= 0 then
self:Remove()
else
self:SetNWInt("health",health)
end
end

[shrublake]

Okay, thank you very much for the input guys.

So, I'm using SetNWInt just as you put it.

I believe the issue I'm having is with retrieving the data in my cl_init file. Here are these:

init.lua
function ENT:OnTakeDamage(dmg)
    local health=self:GetNWInt("health",100) - dmg:GetDamage()--
    if health <= 0 then
        self:Remove()
    else
        self:SetNWInt("health",health)
    end
end

cl_init.lua
        draw.SimpleText("Health:" ..Entity:GetNWInt(health),"DoorFont",-575,-525,Color(255,255,255,255),TEXT_ALIGN_LEFT,TEXT_ALIGN_TOP)

From my understanding, the issue is that I'm not sure how to call an Entity when I can't use self: or ENT:

[Rainbow_Cow]

You have Entity:GetNWInt(health) it should be self:GetNWInt("health")

[joeyjumper]

function ENT:Draw()
draw.SimpleText("Health:" .. self:GetNWInt("health",100),"DoorFont",-575,-525,Color(255,255,255,255),TEXT_ALIGN_LEFT,TEXT_ALIGN_TOP)
end
just an example. you forgot to make the first arguement a string and you also forgot to give entity:GetNWInt a number for argument #2.
argument #2 is what is returned when the value has not been set, so if it's nil, then it'll return nil until set, this'll cause errors relating to concatenating nil values.

[shrublake]

Ahh, that worked. Makes much more sense now. Thank you so much guys, huge help!