[Commander Zane]

If I remember on the FreeSpace wiki it says surface shields use the model itself as the shield, does it seperate sides into quadrants also? Are surface shields used on anything, I didn't see the flag on any regular FreeSpace ships.

[ssmit132]

Surface shields are an FreeSpace Open feature, so ships can use shields without having an actual shield mesh. As far as I know, it uses quadrants. You won't find them on vanilla FS2 ships, but the FSPort Lucifer uses them (in FSO - in retail it has an actual shield mesh).

[Aardwolf]

Lucifer had a shield mesh in retail FS2? I know in FS1 it didn't have anything special (well, it had a lot of HP, but basically it just had invulerable status in the mission)... are you sure about that?

[Kie99]

Lucifer had a shield mesh in retail FS2? I know in FS1 it didn't have anything special (well, it had a lot of HP, but basically it just had invulerable status in the mission)... are you sure about that?

I think he is saying that the Port's version of the Lucifer had a shield mesh.  The retail non-port one certainly didn't.

[ssmit132]

Yes. The FSPort's Lucifer for retail has an actual shield mesh. (I think in 3.0.4 they used that in FSO, too, but now in 3.1 they use a .tbm to switch back to the original capital02.pof with surface shields.)

[Commander Zane]

Does it create a shield hit effect?

[Droid803]

Surface shields do not create a shield hit effect (yet).
I do recall there was some talk about getting it to do so though.

[Galemp]

It would require rendering an ani onto an arbitrary location on the mesh topology, which is functionally identical to decal code and thus not happening anytime soon.