Originally posted by Lynx
Uuuh, surface shields? That thing the whole thread is about?
It's already there. It's in CVS. It's missing a rendering routine to make a fancy graphical effect. Bobboau will make one once I've gotten him what he needs for it.
Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Adding surface shields, automatically, if a ship has a shield mesh is limiting modding opportunities - you can't fly under a shield and shoot a ship. No one's actually done this, AFAIK, but it will be impossible with surface shields.
Forward compatibility is no problem. I was thinking about this. If we decide to keep the implicit surface shield, then I'll add a "no implicit surface shield" flag to the table. But this exposes any such ship to shots randomly piercing its shield, which is the bug I was trying to work around.
It hasn't seemed like a bug to me, I figured it might have even been on purpose to simulate damage to the ship from sheer kinetic energy. The view DOES shake around when you get hit, you'd figure that over time things would rattle around a bit.
It's still a bug. If that's what you want, then either have the shield absorb some % of damage, and/or have some % reliability factor (e.g. absorbs 90% of shots, 10% go through). This bug causes shots to go through the shield pseudo-randomly, which is not cool.
Originally posted by Goober5000
Okay, I didn't know about it. If it happens, fine, it happens. But if it occurs as often as you say, then it will make a significant difference in how any given battle turns out. Mission designers will expect a ship to take X amount of damage in Y amount of time. Surface shields will change this; hence they will break balance.
No, it will break undue player annoyance. Any mission designer that expects a ship to take X damage in Y time without using sexps to make it so is a fool because you can't rely on what the player or AI might do to deal or avoid taking damage. It wouldn't have worked in retail FS2 and it won't work in fs2_open 3.6.5 and it won't work now.
And breaking balance is a no-no. Need I remind you of the last time you broke the balance?
What are you saying? That you're going to go berserk on me every time I code something? That every single change I ever make is going to cause a battle to the death with you?
Originally posted by Bobboau
sheilds failing every now and then doesn't seem too buggy, in fact I've always liked it, it made it seem more real as you wouldn't expect a sheild to be 100% effective all the time.
Okay, if we're going to talk about realism, think about where this shield technology comes from. Yes, the Shivans. The Great Destroyers, the ones the Ancients couldn't even touch.
"Only these were not like the others. They did not die."
Only during the battle in which the Shivans destroyed the
GTSC Plato and
PVC Taurus did God...uhh, I mean Alpha 1 finally manage to overwhelm the shields on one of the Shivan fighters and destroy it.
These shields are supposed to be utterly reliable. That's the idea. A faulty shield system is not fitting of the Great Destroyers.
Originally posted by xenthorious
From what I have read, this bug is far more frequent on fast projectiles then it is on slow ones.
Actually, I just ran some testing and I can't seem to reproduce the bug in a controlled test environment, which consists of a Maxim that does 1 shield damage and 10000 hull damage per shot. The idea is that if the gun ever manages to puncture a shield,
ever, the target's going to take major damage and probably go down right there.
Running in fs2_open 3.6.5 (without surface shields at all), the first test was to blast at a Seraphim with such a Maxim. I never managed to destroy it save by hitting it hard enough to bring down its shields. The second test was for a hostile Herc II to blast at me with such a Maxim. Once again, it had to take down my shields first. The third test changed the Maxim to have some insanely high velocity, which didn't change anything. In a fourth test, I changed the enemy fighter to carry normal Kayers and changed the Herc II (which was both the enemy fighter and mine) to have 9999 shields and 1 HP, and same thing.
The shot isn't going through the shield because it's going too fast, nor is collision detection somehow missing it. If this were the case, it would have happened by now.
Ideas? Anyone?
Originally posted by Goober5000
And I'm worried that fixing this flaw will throw off balance in old campaigns that were designed to rely on it. Not just for the player ships, but for enemy ships as well.
What old campaigns?
Originally posted by Lynx
I think there should be a way for submodels to make them uncovered by shields even if the ship has surface shields. I don't know about the other mods, but I'll make the hangarbays subobjects to take advantage of Bobb's detail box thingy.
Now that I think about it, special handling for surface shield hits on subobjects might be doable. What should we do about hull / shield / subsys damage to the parent ship and its other subsystems? Absorb it by the shield as usual but do subsys damage to the subobject that was hit as though there were no shield over it?
Originally posted by Flaser
2 Simple ideas:
Will it throw off balance? Let's test then debate.
If it does? So what. Make it optional - for projects a'la SWC - problem solved.
If it doesn't screw up anything else I don't see why another "sleeping" feature can't be added to the CVS.
My 2 cents.
It's already in CVS. The bug is irritating but I don't think fixing it is enough to throw off balance, whether it's accomplished by an implicit surface shield workaround or by fixing the bug itself.
Originally posted by Goober5000
1) It throws off balance.
In theory. I should not have to remind you of this. It's very theoretical until someone comes up with a real case of it.
<:mad:>And since you're so hot on theoretical balance breakage, I should point out that the modified TAG behavior that fs2_open introduced, wherein TAGged ships will receive higher priority for turret fire, has a much greater impact on balance than this. Yet it's perfectly acceptable. It also has yet to actually
break anything, but I'm pretty sure you'd be dragging me off in compatibility police handcuffs if it were my idea.
2) It screws up the feature where you can fly underneath shields and shoot at ships.
That can be avoided by turning it off with a table flag, or just by fixing the underlying bug, whatever it is.
Originally posted by StratComm
Just out of curiousity, could it be happening when the shield mesh reaches outside the bounding box by a significant amount? Such that the shield never gets checked? The outer bounding box shouldn't be a problem, but what I'm guessing are the BSP bounding boxes come awefully close to the shield mesh, one way or another. The other obvious question is could the ship be getting checked before the shield for projectile collisions? This makes more sense if projectile speed is directly correlated to accidental penetration, since it'd be more likely to penetrate far enough in a frame to "collide" with both.
Shield impacts (seem to) happen thus: If a projectile collides with a shield mesh, and it's not supposed to pierce the shield, the shield is checked for enough strength to absorb the projectile. If it does, then the shield takes damage, a pretty shield hit effect and sound are made, and the projectile disappears. Otherwise the projectile passes through unscathed, and will probably hit the hull. It might miss the hull instead, which is quite possible and often happens with ships like the Seraphim and Manticore -- with these, it's much easier to bring down the shields of the ship than it is to damage its hull, simply because its hull is so much smaller / thinner than its shield bubble.
