[KARMA]

i was surfing the code last week and i've seen -if i'm not wrong- that the engine already counts the position of hits, for particles/fake debris, if i remember well.
Now as you know i'm a -shield for caps freak- and i was thinking:
surely the best would be to use the decal code for virtual shields for caps, but what about maybe a particle effect?
i was looking the image in the thread about 3d shockwaves made with particles and i noticed that they look somehow like glows: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,15117.0.html
now, imagine one of these particles appearing at the coordinates of the hit and then fading out.
The particle/glow may be of the same color of the laser that hit the ship, or maybe the color may be determined by the race, like thrusters.
It will fade after some istants after the end of the hit (beams)
the size will be determined by the size of the laser, or maybe by the shielddamage received.
It will have a 3d effect that may be cool, like in some anime, and ther will be no problms of polys, normals, neighborood etc etc.....
the only poblem i can think of is about beams: those particles will probably be partially inside the hull, now with too big particles (beams) the effect may be somehow odd
well what you think?

[Nuke]

i added a shield mesh to the lucifer model thanks to the import data button in pcs. and they work, but beams, fighters, and bombers kinda go through shields.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Nuke
i added a shield mesh to the lucifer model thanks to the import data button in pcs. and they work, but beams, fighters, and bombers kinda go through shields.

I can't count shielded lucifer pofs anymore
yeah, shields work on capship, tbut they look bad, right now.

[Bobboau]

that's becase they arn't dense enough, I think shields are dynamicly loaded so they can be as dense as you want.
someone make a shielded cap ship with a 8,000 tri shield mesh

[Nuke]

i dont think it has to do with the number of triangles in the mesh, but with the fact that the energy distortion animation, which appears to be dynamicly mapped onto the mesh, is scaled up with the mesh for some reason. we need a way to better control the resolution of the distortion animation, such as scale it up with the damage of the weapon hitting it.

[Bobboau]

I _know_ it has to do with the number of tringles on the mesh (or more accurately the size of the triangles)

[KARMA]

actually i was looking for a way not using a 8000 polys/2 hour work shield mesh, that may look better, and that could be probably easyer to do and less performance hit than decals (but obviously decals remain the best way to do virtual shields, when they will be optimized and implemented)
and i thought that a 3d effect (the glow sphere) could be very cool (or very odd, i think that it has never be done in other games)

[Fry_Day]

The blurry shield effect is due to triangles having a large area. The shield effect is mapped to the nearest triangles in the shield mesh, so if the triangles are very large, as is the case with the lucifer shield (compare sizes to fighter-sized shields), it'll be big.

[TrashMan]

Mabe changing the shieldhit ani would help?

[Nico]

Originally posted by Bobboau
that's becase they arn't dense enough, I think shields are dynamicly loaded so they can be as dense as you want.
someone make a shielded cap ship with a 8,000 tri shield mesh

but you can't... you can only have one shield subobject, and the limit is about 820, remember?

[Nuke]

if you can find a way to scale down the mapping coordinates so that the animation will render in a smaller area, i think it would look better. then all you have to do is add a "solid shields" tag so that players cannot fly their bombers through them.

while were on the subject, id like to see more shield rendering options, such as custom impact effects.

[Bobboau]

shields are completly diferent from ship subobjects, they are completly loaded dynamicly meaning that they can have as many polygons as you want (suposedly)

the way shields are rendered is by shrink raping UV coordanants onto the mesh, if you don't have enough triangles then they will be too big, you need a denser mesh, or they will look bad

someone with an hour of free time make a high density mesh around the lucifer and test it out, you can probly use TS's nurbs tool to do this quickly

[Nuke]

good point, i will give it a go and see what it looks like.

[KARMA]

but will this shield mesh cause slow downs due to pcount, or not?

[Bobboau]

maybe

[TrashMan]

Mmmmm..... capship shielding....

gonna give it a try

[Bobboau]

anyone done it yet?

actualy someone try this
it will not open up in any model veiwer, but I think it might work in game

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by Venom


but you can't... you can only have one shield subobject, and the limit is about 820, remember?

Actually, the limit is 1600..
I made a shielded capship (about 1490 polys shield)..

[KARMA]

as said from bobbau above, the shield mesh can probably be of any pcount you want

[TrashMan]

No..it's 1600. Tried it.
I have the newest PCS version and it didn't want to convert.
WARNING shield poly>1600!