At first I thought this just automatically pressed "Q" all the time, but now that I see it... It's infinitely better than surface shields
That's what I thought too. And even now I don't immediately see what's the advantage over old surface shields. Perhaps I'm just missing something really obvious here, wouldn't be the first time.
I missed this the first time around. This is pretty cool.
Ooh. I don't suppose there's a way to do some auto-topology magic so that shield impacts could be projected?
Actually I don't think it would be terribly hard to do by just playing the impact animation on a flat quad, positioned on the point of impact and oriented along the hull. Simulating fancier geometry than that would be much harder.
That sounds like the best approach. I took a look at the shield hit display code back when surface-shields were added, and it is utterly inscrutable.
Each weapon already has $Impact explosion and $Impact radius defined in weapons.tbl or tbm, why not just use those for shield hit but replace $Impact explosion with $Shield impact from ships.tbl or tbm? That way shield impact could vary from ship to ship but impact radius is same as it would be when weapon hits hull.