Spring RTS Engine

This is a collated list of feature requests related to SHIELDS (and Shields alone!) Post in the thread and i'll add your request to the list...

tags:
ShieldOnoffable - shields should be able to be switched off (me)
ShieldConstantEnergyDrain - when a shield is active ti should be allowed to constantly drain Energy like any other special feature (eg cloaking) (me)
AOEDamageReduction - a percentage of AOE damage is allowed through the shield. (Hunter0000)

general features:
Shields should be able to block all projectiles/weapons - at the moment lightning and flamethrowers cannot be blocked. (me)
Shields should attempt to block AOE damage - if they can't block it all then the remainder should be allowed to affect whatever is inside the shield (Swiftspear)
LOD for rendering large number of shields onscreen - shields always render at full quality (as far as i can tell) and cause severe slowdowns once you approach the 200 mark (me)
Shields should use the water renderer - they should deform when hit/be reflective when on Ultra-leet graphics settings (Warlord Zsinj)
Shields should use armorclasses of the unit - instead of default damage (Forboding Angel)

bugs:
Shields with ShieldEnergyUse tags can always deflect beamlasers because they do not check energy before deflecting (KDR_11K)

unpossible wrote:it doesn't make sense that shields can 'store' energy - there should be an option to have them drain E all the time while they're on, like a cloak or any other special ability.

i came to trying to (think about) balance for HvC and realised it's impossible for a unit with shields to be dependent on energy to keep the shield working - sooner and later it just finds enough and stores it!

surely if you want to make it drain energy all the time no matter what, you can simply use the old 'uses X energy when turned on' functionality that units like radars use? Then for the shield strength, just give it whatever recharge rate and max capacity you want, and 0 energy cost to regenerate.

true but he wants it so that having a lot of E gen units as CLout is necessaryish. also that method (i believe) wouldn't cause the shield to stop working if there was no E??? Am i right or am i just babbling???

that's right- the trouble is at the moment the shields only need E to charge. if the E is cut then the shields saty on. the main problem is i was going to balance the mod using energy structures as an 'effective' population limit, beyond which units won't be able to use shields & cloaks. with this system some of the shields will charge, then more then more with no limit to the ammount of shields on at any one time. all it needs is enough time to charge the shields one by one.
i need them draining all at all times - they'll still charge up but at no cost. the cost will be keeping them active

ok, new system, i'll be collating shield related things in this thread

shields should be semi-reflective, and/or use the advanced water renderer and ripple and deform when things hit them, when set on the highest graphical settings.

Shields with "ShieldEnergyUse" will not drain or check energy (ressource, not shield power) when hit with beamlasers, the laser is deflected even if there wasn't enough energy to deflect a shot.

similar-ish to Swift's

Tag: ShieldAOEBlock:50;

defines the %age the shield reduces the AOE of an impacting weapon has.

This would make EE shields possible too yay! As well as a number of other things I would imagine.

EE shields would only stop energy weapons (if they're like Earth's shields), do those even have AoE?

The bigger problem would be the NI's electro guns. That's their favourite weapon.

ah, that's another one. I'm pretty sure it's dead easy to correct the necessary parts in the code - but i have no idea how to do it. it look like a copy & paste job, but i wouldn't know what al the references were to the weapons.cpp thingys that need to be changed. all lightning & flame are missing is this, as far as i can tell: in the rts/sim/projectiles section

*bump* FA's suggestion added

Warlord Zsinj wrote:shields should be semi-reflective, and/or use the advanced water renderer and ripple and deform when things hit them, when set on the highest graphical settings.

I'm not sure if the water renderer could be simply plastered onto sheilds although it would be nice.

You can already on/off shields...

AimWeaponX()
{
if(get ACTIVATION) {
return TRUE; }
if(!get ACTIVATION) {
return FALSE; }
}

Simple as that, and I'd rather it be left that way than giving us *less* control.

How about shieldSwallowProjectile which would simply remove the projectile from play instead of making it explode? Would already solve many issues.

Gnome wrote:You can already on/off shields...

AimWeaponX()
{
if(get ACTIVATION) {
return TRUE; }
if(!get ACTIVATION) {
return FALSE; }
}

Simple as that, and I'd rather it be left that way than giving us *less* control.

quite... but how do you trigger it in a useful way?

You make it check if the unit is on or off (which I'm not completely sure this script would do, is ACTIVATION really set automatically or do you have to do that via script?)?

ACTIVATION is hooked to the On/Off button... can't get much more useful than that. Well, other than being able to plug buttons into the GUI dynamically... *cough*

Just make sure you have onoffable=1 in the FBI and probably ActivateWhenBuilt=1 too, though that's your choice. I think you need to run a BUILD_PERCENT_LEFT loop in Create() if you do it this way just so the shield doesn't turn on while it's under construction, but I'm not 100% sure on that quite yet. Still trying some little things.

Ah, I thought that button just called Activate() and Deactivate() and left it up to the scripter to set ACTIVATION to make the on-offable tags like EnergyUse count...

Well, a semitransparent normalmap would be a nice effect for the shields. Something other than a plain colour.

KDR_11k wrote:Ah, I thought that button just called Activate() and Deactivate() and left it up to the scripter to set ACTIVATION to make the on-offable tags like EnergyUse count...

Well, I think it does call those functions, but it also toggles the true/false status of ACTIVATION as well, making it very easy to reference elsewhere.