Red sphere spotted around landed ship

[Brianetta]

Version: 50f2521 Saved game: WikiSend

Not entirely sure what's up here. I haven't seen it before. The pictures show an Imperial Trader parked on an adjacent pad upon game start. It's red and translucent, and sometimes you can't see buildings through it, depending on angle.

[Luomu]

It is the shield generator effect. Buy yourself one or spawn a few enemy ships with ctrl+f12:

This is what happens when blended geometry is drawn without depth sorting. If you first draw terrain behind the shield bubble, then shield effect with blending and then a building behind the shield bubble, the effect will be correct regards to the terrain but not the building. It's not so noticeable in space.

To fix: either sort things, or implement a new effect that is not an always-on red bubble - if it's just a thing that flashes when hit the problem is less noticeable.

[robn]

Well we do sort things, but the city gets sorted as a single entity, which is why it works sometimes but not others - the ship and the city are compared based on their centre points and distance to camera.

There's a few possible approaches to fixing this. Sort city buildings individually (which would allow transparent building windows), or decouple special effects from their physical objects and add them as a separate drawable thing that gets sorted properly.

For this particular case, a new shield effect would be great. I've talked about a shimmery "second skin" kinda thing in the past, which could be done by drawing the ship's collision mesh with some nice blending or whatever over the top of the ship, possibly scaled up a little so it doesn't appear right on the actual ship body but a little way from it. That's one of many possibilities of course.

[Brianetta]

That last would really bring out the foibles in the Hammerhead's collision mesh.

[Luomu]

I added a shield effect prototype to this webgl demo, click the "Hit" button: (I hope the animation speed is ok - it's supposed to flash by quite fast): http://luomu.github.com/pioneer/shippainter/

This type of effect wouldn't require a special mesh for every ship, it would be "only" necessary to figure out the hit direction and transform so the effect adequately covers the ship.

[robn]

That's lovely :)

[Luomu]

Doesn't happen with the current shield effect, it doesn't write depth so the see-through scenario cannot happen.