3 things...

[Melkor]

1. Should Star Wars ships have skin tight shields, or spherical shields? (And I don't mean strictly spherical, just away from the hull)

2. If skin tight, how do I make them without killing framerates?

3. Damocles, regarding engagement distances, I found it has to do with max_range and max_track of the shortest range weapon on the ship...I think...

never mind number 3...I was wrong...

[Pheonix Starflare]

I would say the shields should conform to the ship's hull.
As far as not killing framerates...were you planning on having the entire shield glow when the ship is hit?

[Melkor]

I figure there are two ways to go about it: either give the shield a color texture, which will cause the region around the hit to glow, or give it a black texture to make it so only the hit effect shows up. Either way, as far as I know the entire shield model is rendered. If they're skin tight, they need to have roughly the same number of polys as the ship, which effectively doubles the rendering load every time there's an impact. Am I wrong about this?

[Duken]

As far as i remember its hull conforming shields. And the fluff says that the shields glow when hit.

[DamoclesX]

For shields

I use the HIGHEST detail model just with a shield texture and trans lucent and trans parent

you would think it would drop fps but so far it didnt.

and it looks cool

I cant get bubble shields to work.. well I can get them to work, just not look decent, they look horrible so I need to work on that in my spare time I Think


remember you can do crazy shit.. you can have shield models that only cover part of the body, great way to make some areas open to attack(like the shield generators)

[Melkor]

I figured out what was causing my framerate drop: I had used two seperate models for the Star Destroyer in order to make texturing easier, but that made it necessary for the game to calculate lighting for two seperate entities, thus slowing things down. When I combined the models, it got rid of the slow-down, and also made the in-game lighting look better. Two birds with one stone! This brings up another question, though: it seems there's a rendering problem concerning large models at great distances, ie more distant models get rendered in the foreground. It also seems to affect engine glows. Is there a fix for this?

[DamoclesX]

hey, I thought that was just me..

I noticed it on the big b5 cap ships....

[Melkor]

ORIGINAL: DamoclesX
remember you can do crazy shit.. you can have shield models that only cover part of the body, great way to make some areas open to attack(like the shield generators)

I don't know if I'm opening a can of worms, but I think I prefer the sensor dome argument for those big, exposed, vulnerable looking things...[;)]

[Pheonix Starflare]

ORIGINAL: Melkor
I don't know if I'm opening a can of worms, but I think I prefer the sensor dome argument for those big, exposed, vulnerable looking things...[;)]

Ditto. Read this. I find it fairly convincing and he doesnt write off EU stuff which helps me approve of him more. All of the articles are fascinating reading for any technically-minded SW fan, imho.

[Duken]

ORIGINAL: Pheonix Starflare

ORIGINAL: Melkor
I don't know if I'm opening a can of worms, but I think I prefer the sensor dome argument for those big, exposed, vulnerable looking things...[;)]

Ditto. Read this. I find it fairly convincing and he doesnt write off EU stuff which helps me approve of him more. All of the articles are fascinating reading for any technically-minded SW fan, imho.

bah, try SD.net, Wayne Poes site, and the SWTC. And they are sensor domes, the the new RotJ dvd provees it.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/
http://filmgate.h4h.com/louis/vsfaq.html
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/

Yes, the first two are VS sites. But they all do a good job of analyzing SW (and ST if someone wants to do a mod)

[EDIT]
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Dat ... mit=Submit

First Pic show a Turbolaser Interacting with shields.