[pecenipicek]

If given a way to tell if the shields have been struck, then about the best you could do with the kind of material system described would be to have the whole shield shimmer. For anything more advanced you'd need to be forming systems that project certain effects onto the shield when needed, or perhaps a poor-mans UV projection system would involve the modeller unwrapping the shield mesh onto a 'shield texture', and somehow working out where on the texture space the strike occurred and passing that on to the material system to draw whatever effect was supposed to occur.

There'd be a seam though, since if the shield texture was stuck near an edge, it wouldn't neatly wrap around to the other side of the map....

Yeah that kind of location-variable effect would be quite difficult. :\

quasi-volumetric shaders on the other hand... where the shield mesh would only define the outer boundary to which the shield effect would extend and inside it would be a "sphere" made of (for example only, not that experienced with shaders) particles which would react to hits. the seam wouldnt really matter that much if using the uv map for example.

[Tomo]

Shaders would be the logical way to do this - all you need is the mesh itself, plus the location of the impactor.

- In fact, there's a lot of very nice things one could do with a shield shader if you pass the vector, size (maybe even a texture) for the impactor.

'Splash' across the shield could be changed depending on the angle of impact of the weapon - glancing blows could easily look different to straight-on blows, you could 'bend' the shield as well (GFX only, *not* collision), and maybe even use a different kinds of splash depending on the weapon.