Temporary decals showing shield hits.

[fluffyfreak]

Description:

In other games with shields you get a nice effect across the shield surface when you're hit by weapon fire. The idea would be to replicate that effect in Pioneer. It only has to be fleeting and would work like a decal, or number of decals, displayed on the shield sphere geometry.

[Luomu]

In the old ship painter demo, I had a hit effect ("Hit me" button): http://luomu.github.com/pioneer/shippainter/

Sphere hugging the model shape + gradient texture + UV pan.

[fluffyfreak]

Ooh that's quite nice, I had in mind something like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtLGYTWbcq0&list=LP6pkkSxF1H8k&index=1&feature=plcp) at about 2:30 but erm... better :D

[fluffyfreak]

@Luomu to further my point, I didn't mean that your code/example wasn't good enough, just that I had in mind using a texture atlas of several frames of animation to give the effect of "crackling" energy dissipating across a shield.

[Luomu]

No problem, I just did not have anything to add :) I just wanted to show that effect to someone since it is not on my todo list. Some parts of it could be also used for a fiery re-entry effect.

[fluffyfreak]

I've given the hull heating effect a go previously (mentioned in #12). The problems I had implementing it in Pioneer was mostly time, getting used to Pioneers shaders, and figuring out the direction of travel through a planets atmosphere.

It might be cool to combine the effects, glowing & pulsing shields until they fail then heating the hull until it fails and the ship explodes :)