[Kie99]

How about this, if you want a capital ship to be shielded you have to create a shield mesh for it (Something I wouldn't even dare trying to do) and edit the tables, and even a fighter can just fly within the shield and start shooting the ship.
What about if you could just tick a box and a shield pops up on the ship right next to the hull?

I don't know if this is possible but I heard someone mentioning it in another thread.

[Trivial Psychic]

Bob's proposed decal-based shield effect is the closest thing on the horizon, though it won't render in front of the hull.  It gets added on as a temporary extra skin just like impact decals, though its an ani.

[pecenipicek]

shield hit is an ani...

[aldo_14]

But shield hit uses a physically modelled seperate mesh to detect the hit & draw the ani; bobs code/idea IIRC uses the ships hull to define the shield 'mesh'- like impact decals but using a temporary animation (ani) rather than a static pcx (etc) image.

[WMCoolmon]

I think it is possible, but unreliable and looks ugly.

[Anaz]

I dunno...I think fighters flying under shields would be cool...

[WMCoolmon]

It's an issue of polycount...if your shield mesh is too detailed,it slows things down. If it's not as detailed, shield hits are huge.

[Lynx]

Yeah, and for blocky ships like the Orion(or most of our capships in WCS) the texture stretching would be hideous, unless you made a very detailed mesh which would slow down things.

Is perhaps possible to have an additional texture layer with a sheild texture(It'd be nothing detailed, a blue white texture or something) that shows up where the ship has ben hit?

I rememer Bobbau considering something like that for damage decals.

[WMCoolmon]

Come to think of it, I thought this was possible with damage decals. I thought there were two animations - one played when the ship was hit by the weapon, and then one that was left behind (eg one might be a burning away hull texture, and the other, flames slowly burning inside the hull.)

Now, maybe if you made a shield hit animation for the first one, and used a transparent image or animation for the second one........