Secondly, that is essentially the exact same thing as a 2D shockwave; a planar projection of a spherical shockwave.
Only difference is that it uses a POF model file as a method of showing the shockwave texture, whereas 2D shockwave texture is rendered as a sprite on the screen, which always faces the viewpoint automatically.
Which was exactly my point: A sphere, no matter what angle looked at from, will be projected as a circle. All references posted on discussion of the skockwaves show exactly this: an expanding circle. Using 3D waves with normal facing the player would look like expanding spheres while variable perspective would satisfy those who like disk-shaped waves (which btw. don't make much sense from a physical approach).
Yes.
Also (aafik) using a .pof should give much more detailed results and blend better into the worls as sprites.
No. The only reason why the "3D" shockwave looks sharper is it's mapping. It is using a quarter map sector tile as opposed to the full map used by the 2D, sprite shockwave. Because of this, the apparent resolution of the 3D shockwave can be the same as 2D shockwave, but with only 1/4 of memory usage (assuming both effects use similarly stored textures).
Or conversely, if the effects are the same resolution, the apparent resolution of the 3D shockwave can be doubled with same memory usage.
However, using a POF does NOT automatically guarantee any such thing as better blending to the world. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. If any hard edges are visible, they will not look natural at all. Even less if anti-aliasing is not used. Sprite is just an arbitrary plane in the space where the effect texture is drawn to; and a plane is technically a 3D object just as much as more complex model where the texture can be projected - like the 3D model.
The difference is, a plane only has two faces (two triangles) while a more complicated 3D model would have way more. And technically, if you use a model of a plane, the result would be the exact same as using an effect sprite. With the exception, of course, that it would probably use more resources than just using the effect as a sprite.
An interesting experiment would be to make a sprite shockwave that consists of four quarters expanding from the centre where their inner corners meet, and using the 3D shockwave's texture for it... By my estimation, the only problem would be to keep the individual quarters NOT facing the player but instead aligned with a common normal vector to form an univorm plane. This is necessary to match the edges of the textures. I'm relatively sure it can be done somehow, yet I would have no idea if the sprite system's drawing angles can be manipulated as such or would it indeed require a simple 3D model of a plane.
Which, as already stated, wouldn't work on multiplayer very well at all.
Personally I so far prefer the 2D shockwaves in MediaVP's as they are the closest high-res approximation of Volition shockwaves we have had yet.
The best solution would be a volumetrically expanding shockwave, which could be achieved by an expanding sphere model with distortion/glow shaders.
Sorry for lacking the background here, is it possible or not to apply shadres to .pof models?
Well, not as such. Parallax Object Files are used for many things but they don't support a full material system. This trickery should be done on code level or table level. The model should just be one simple primitive sphere mapped with a glow map, and the shaders specified in somewhere like shockwave.tbl would then take care of applying necessary effects to it to make it look like a shockwave. Heat distortion, motion blurring the expanding shockwave, convolution, bloom; these would work well to achieve a three-dimensional expanding shock front look. Particles could be spawned by the expanding sphere as well.
The thing is, I have no idea how to do this. I'm reasonably sure that someone will at some point do this, though.
