Printing a score counter in greenfoot. Outputting zero

Question

I am trying to output a score in the greenfoot IDE and all is working fine (the score is increasing) until I try to print it. When I try to print it it changes to zero for some reason.

Crab Class:

public class Crab extends Animal
{
    int health = 10;
    int score = 0;
    public void act()
    {
        score = score + 1;
        System.out.println(score);
        //JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, newscore, "You lose!", JOptionPane.WARNING_MESSAGE);
        if (Greenfoot.isKeyDown("Left"))
        {
            turn(-3);
        }
        if (Greenfoot.isKeyDown("Right"))
        {
            turn(3);
        }
        if (canSee(Worm.class))
        {
            eat(Worm.class);
        }
        move();
        healthBar();
    }
    public void healthBar()
    {
        if (atWorldEdge())
        {
            Greenfoot.playSound("pew.wav");
            move(-20);
            turn(180);
            health = health - 1;
        }
        if (health <= 0)
        {
            Message msgObject = new Message();
            msgObject.youLose();
            Greenfoot.stop();
        }
    }
}

Message Class:

public class Message extends Crab
{
    /**
     * Act - do whatever the Message wants to do. This method is called whenever
     * the 'Act' or 'Run' button gets pressed in the environment.
     */
    public void youLose() 
    {
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Try again next time. Your score was  " + score, "You lose!", JOptionPane.WARNING_MESSAGE);
    }    
}

In the act method when I try to print out the score it shows it is increasing but when I print it out with JOptionPane or as normal at the end of the program it gives me 0.

Example:

https://i.sstatic.net/mZGOX.png

Answer 1

You're making a completely new object to invoke your youLose() method on. By doing this, your score-counter will be set to zero again. You could try solving this by making a new constructor for Message that allows to pass the score.

public Message(int score) {
    this.score = score;
}

PS: I don't see why it would be useful to make your Message class inherit from Crab