[Mad Bomber]

So I'm farting around with a variety of models, and I want to have different factions have color-coded shields (for example, how Kilrathi and Confed forces have red and blue shields, respectively, in WCS).

Suppose one faction captured another faction's ship, and gave it a refit, including nifty green-colored shields to replace the old shielding unit. Is there any way I can avoid using up a table entry just to reflect the change of $Shield Color, the way one can change a paint job with in-mission texture replacement?

I'm guessing the answer is no, but i wanted to ask just in case. If not, I'll suggest it to the coders.

[Cyborg17]

Not that I know of.  It's only one table entry, though.  Are you running up against the limit?

[Mad Bomber]

Not at present, but I'd prefer not to risk it if I can avoid it. It just seemed like the sort of thing there'd be a relatively easy fix for.

Then again it's probably just paranoia on my part 

[Kopachris]

Shield color can be defined in the ships.tbl file, and would have to be defined for each ship; i.e. you'd have to have a separate ships.tbl entry for a given ship for each faction (like how they did the SF Dragon#Terrans in FS1).  This is currently the only way to handle shield color.

[procdrone]

Aren't the shields color specified by the ships respective spieces entery, just like in FS Terran blue, vasudan Green and Shivan red? If I am correct, then you're unable to change the respective spieces of the ship without making new entries in the ships.tbl

Or create two exacly same entries for the ship you want, and place your shield color species in the one, and another in the second. If so, you're able to change ship classes during game via SEXP? (not sure on that one).

[Dragon]

No, this doesn't depend on species. Shield animation might (not quite sure about that, though, and this can likely be overriden), but the color is set in the ship's entry.

[fightermedic]

only if you use a black and white shield animation i think, if you use a colored one, it will use the colour of that animation as far as i am aware

[Dragon]

Well, yes and no. Even on a colored animation, you'll get a "tint" of sorts when you assign a different color in ship's table. Could make for some interesting effects, but I never experimented with it (only experienced it when I accidentally mismatched the anim and the color).