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Front-only repulsor shield
Posted: 05 Oct 2007, 07:25
by MadRat
I can see some amazing benefits from a front repulsor shield. It could be simple, like something that could simply take the units footprint and draw a square area in front of the unit. As the unit turned, the shield would turn to always face straight out from the base. Anything that hits the front shield could be repulsed just like the shield generator, only deflected at a refractive angle.
This would allow us to simulate armor battles where frontal armor would be better than side or top armors. It would also allow units with said shield to only be destroyed from side, top/bottom, and rear shots.
A nice refinement to the idea would be a way to define the model piece that the shield was generated from. This would allow a mod maker to develop units where they have a shield always facing their nearest threat, which means some sort of pincer attack has to be coordinated to kill it efficiently.
Posted: 05 Oct 2007, 08:17
by Gnomre
Posted: 05 Oct 2007, 09:09
by MadRat
I hate the whole idea of that double damage for flanking. And it really needs an easy off switch... its ass backwards to be enabled by default.
Posted: 05 Oct 2007, 11:12
by KDR_11k
Yeah, the current bonusshield behaviour should be disabled by default. Unfortunately that'll probably mess some balancing up. A modrules switch would be easy to use but someone is bound to want a per-unit setting (even though the current behaviour of the bonusshield seems totally useless to me). So I guess we'll end up with yet another tag we have to throw into every single unit fbi...
Posted: 05 Oct 2007, 20:32
by Saktoth
A nice refinement to the idea would be a way to define the model piece that the shield was generated from. This would allow a mod maker to develop units where they have a shield always facing their nearest threat, which means some sort of pincer attack has to be coordinated to kill it efficiently.
You can already do this, since you need a weapon slot for a shield and thus the shield is emitted from the weapon piece. However, at the moment, though the visible shield follows the weapon piece the actual shield does not, it remains at the 0 0 0 location on the model. This means all projectile will be deflected as if the shield was at 0 0 0. The exception to this is beamlasers, which seem to collide with the visible shield, not the one emitted from the 0 0 0 position. Presumably this is because beamlaser collision with shields was done later.
Fix PLEASE. Please.

Posted: 05 Oct 2007, 21:03
by lurker
The code for directional shields is simple and I can whip up a quick patch if you want, but visualization might take longer. I'll also look at the placement issue on my spring-coding weekend here.
Posted: 05 Oct 2007, 23:27
by Saktoth
Really, if you can just stick the shield in front of the unit you can do the directional thing easy.
Posted: 17 Nov 2007, 08:26
by lurker
Okay, thanks to kdr giving me a fresh perspective, aka. I'm an idiot it only takes a single transform with dot products and I should have rethought the problem after realizing the awesomeness of dot products a couple months ago, I should pump out a directional shields patch easily, probably this weekend.
And then I'll do shield with different repulse direction characteristics. Then more. I have lots of fun ideas for shields.
Posted: 17 Nov 2007, 18:09
by Argh
WOOT, that'd be something I'd definitely use.
Posted: 17 Nov 2007, 18:59
by lurker
Saktoth wrote:A nice refinement to the idea would be a way to define the model piece that the shield was generated from. This would allow a mod maker to develop units where they have a shield always facing their nearest threat, which means some sort of pincer attack has to be coordinated to kill it efficiently.
You can already do this, since you need a weapon slot for a shield and thus the shield is emitted from the weapon piece. However, at the moment, though the visible shield follows the weapon piece the actual shield does not, it remains at the 0 0 0 location on the model. This means all projectile will be deflected as if the shield was at 0 0 0. The exception to this is beamlasers, which seem to collide with the visible shield, not the one emitted from the 0 0 0 position. Presumably this is because beamlaser collision with shields was done later.
Fix PLEASE. Please.

Is this still true? If it is it should be an extremely simple fix.
Edit: already fixed, and the dirctional repulsion direction is done. Now to do the visualization. I should probably add a tag to determine if the texture reorients...