the animation is 5 frames first being the ship icon, then the shield segments in the order front, right, back, left the trick is that youre only allowed 15 shades of grey from black to white. all other colors in the table must be green. it seems that youre required to use the last 15 slots in the color table for the colors, starting at white and goinf down to black. shield quadrants need to have a gradient from the outer edge of the shields being the most white, while the inner edge needs to me the darkest. these things seem to be rendered by subtracting a number from each pixel's color index inversely proportionate to the quadrants strength. as your shields are lost the index is shifted down changing the pixels to the next color. the gradient makes the inside of the shield appear to vanish fisrt while the outer layers are the last to fall.
best bet is to use aniview32 to extract frames from an existing sheild icon, save their color table, and then apply that table to your shield icon frames, name them shld0000.pcx-shld-0004.pcx and run volition's ani conversion utility on them.
why, may i ask do we not have full color eff shield icons yet? sure we can have the engine render the icons, but those sorta look ugly. i could probibly get my 3d shield icons to work if i can figure out how to make model level texture replacement work.
