Having spherical shields introduces a few more problems, or elements of game design:

For very large long and thin ships, you have a lot of empty space between the shield and the space ship surface. Which means:
1. it''s too easy to hit shields of large ships
2. small ships may be able to go thru the bounding sphere of the shield, which raises a few more points:
. a) small ships bounce off the shields of big ships, so they can''t approach the big ship. That kinda sucks.
. b) enemy fighters can fly thru the bounding sphere and start attacking the big ship completely bypassing its shields. That also sucks

Here''s another interesting possibility: have enemy ships bounce off the shield sphere, but not friendly units. That way friendly units can stay inside the big shield and be under its protection. That would make for some interesting strategies

So far, I think having shields tightly layered on top of armor is safest option, tho not most interesting one

You could go for a slightly different approach: put a larger mesh around the ship as the shield: just don''t render it normally. This gives -really cool- graphical effects when you fire into the shield because you render a piece of semi-transparent mesh around the
ship.

Its slightly more work, to find if/when the stuff fired intersects the shield, but is very cool; I saw an example of a shield like this in a demo program.

In the demo, the mesh was rendered as a wireframe, with the intensity of the frame colour representing shield strength. When a shot hit the shield, those panels the beam hit, or the blast intersected, where rendered briefly as semi transparent, showing the shield active.

When other ships came near the ship, they just slowed down, and never actually intersected with the shield.

I don''t know how you''d justify a shield like that in game physics.... but it looked really cool. =)

(Also consider layered shields. That would be very cool; especially if you have outer layer shields that friendly ships can hind in, from big support vessels)

so you are proposing having both spherical and ship-wrapping shield geometry?

I recently got this idea:

Instead of thinking of force shields as one of those "phenomena at a distance", why not think of them as special energy flowing thru a special material (armor). When this energy flows thru special armor, it has the effect of strengthening the molecular bonds in the armor, thus making it stronger. And also increasing damage-reflective property of the armor.

do you think this is cool enough to replace classic force fields?

quote: Original post by berserk

Instead of thinking of force shields as one of those "phenomena at a distance", why not think of them as special energy flowing thru a special material (armor). When this energy flows thru special armor, it has the effect of strengthening the molecular bonds in the armor, thus making it stronger. And also increasing damage-reflective property of the armor.

Guess what.... They already have that in Startrek... it''s called a Structural Interigerty field.... or something to that effect... but it does almost the Exact same thing you suggested.

I''m still thinking whether I should go with "structural integrity" field or the "force" field. Or maybe both?

In my game, armor plays a much more important role than shields.

Do everything!

Have Structural Integrity Fields that affect how much damage the ship takes when all it''s outer fields are depleted.

Have High-Bandwidth Force Shields that wrap the hull closely (like what Shadow-Mint suggested).

Then have Low-Bandwidth Force Shields, that are mounted generators inside a ship which can project (for a short time/at a high energy cost) a mid-range bubble of impassibility in space (for friendly ships to hide in, or to take really heavy shots).

If you find a programmer who would be willing to do this for you, let me know

George D. Filiotis
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!

I Say that If Shields aren''t gonna be very important go with the metaball approach, have the shields flash when they are hit... they will look cool and collision detection will be faster.

Try to look at it from the reverse situation. How much firepower will it take to get through an enemy shield? Should the player be able to take advantage of the fact that the enemy is slow at turning and has weak shielding in the back? Or would it be better to just have a blast-fest and sort the rubble after constant firing. THEN, When you decide which is better, make your game consistant with it''s rules and give the player the same thing.

Or, you could just say to hell with the whole concept of shielding in the paranormal sense and just let the player buy bigger and better plates of supermetal for the hull and just allocate more plate sections on bigger ships...

-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.

I''d go with metaballs simply because they''re cool and original.

Each shield generator emits a field according to an inverse square function. The force field at a given point is given by the sum of all individual fields.

The shield, therefore, is not just a "shell," but a volume. Think of the shields as "negative energy" and weapon blasts as "positive energy." As a shot enters a shield, you add the two energies together to get the resulting energy of that space. If the result is positive, the shot remains, and it continues forward with that new, lower energy. The energy of that space is left as zero (no shields) when the shot moves on to the next space. Now, for example, the next space has a value of -10, and the shot had previously been left with a value of 2. Now, the shot is destroyed, and the shields are left at -8.

Now on to shield regeneration: Each timestep, a small amount (proportional to the sum-of-inverse-square ideal) is added to each voxel of the shield that is at less than the original value. If a user wants to increase the rate of shield regeneration at a specific part of the ship, he can increase power to a specific shield generator, whose inverse-square field of influence will then have more effect.

This all probably sounds very complicated, but it isn''t really. I guess to describe it to non Math-and-Physics-Forum people, I''ll say this: It''s like the shield is a cloud, and weapon shots "carve out" this cloud; the shot and the shield neutralize each other. The outer, thin areas of the cloud do less to neutralize shots than the inner areas, but all areas affect the shot as it moves through them. More poweful shots get further into the cloud. If the shot is powerful enough to "tunnel" all the way through the cloud to reach the ship, then the ship is hit.

As you can tell, I''m not too good with metaphors. But I hope I got the message across.

quote: Original post by TerranFury
I''d go with metaballs simply because they''re cool and original.

Each shield generator emits a field according to an inverse square function. The force field at a given point is given by the sum of all individual fields.

The shield, therefore, is not just a "shell," but a volume. Think of the shields as "negative energy" and weapon blasts as "positive energy." As a shot enters a shield, you add the two energies together to get the resulting energy of that space. If the result is positive, the shot remains, and it continues forward with that new, lower energy. The energy of that space is left as zero (no shields) when the shot moves on to the next space. Now, for example, the next space has a value of -10, and the shot had previously been left with a value of 2. Now, the shot is destroyed, and the shields are left at -8.

Now on to shield regeneration: Each timestep, a small amount (proportional to the sum-of-inverse-square ideal) is added to each voxel of the shield that is at less than the original value. If a user wants to increase the rate of shield regeneration at a specific part of the ship, he can increase power to a specific shield generator, whose inverse-square field of influence will then have more effect.

This all probably sounds very complicated, but it isn''t really. I guess to describe it to non Math-and-Physics-Forum people, I''ll say this: It''s like the shield is a cloud, and weapon shots "carve out" this cloud; the shot and the shield neutralize each other. The outer, thin areas of the cloud do less to neutralize shots than the inner areas, but all areas affect the shot as it moves through them. More poweful shots get further into the cloud. If the shot is powerful enough to "tunnel" all the way through the cloud to reach the ship, then the ship is hit.

As you can tell, I''m not too good with metaphors. But I hope I got the message across.

I Like your idea... but it sdounds like it might take a little extra memory... though it sounds cool