How is the multi-source shield work coming along?asked by Bacon of War

Actually, really well. I actually want to say Sandy posted an image a couple weeks ago onto the main Facebook showing one of our programmers, Chad Zamzow. He's been doing a lot of work getting the back-end tech that we need to get the shield pooling up and running, so we've got some really cool stuff in the works for that with just making shield management involved and not just, okay, I'm just pushing it to this face, but the trade-offs and the consequences of reinforcing a shield, of letting a side get weak, of how much power management you're doing to keep the shield values at optimal level.

The moment to moment is a little bit more meaningful. The amount of time that you spend at any given shield priority can drastically affect the outcome because of the different weights on how things refill, on how much health it takes, how much health it has and how much damage it takes accordingly. It makes those split-second decisions much more important than they used to be. And now that's also further supported by the ability to make those deeper loadout decisions, because now that you don't have just the one shield generator to the one shield, then we can have a lot more interaction between the components on that.

And visually speaking, we're going to move away from the kind of blobby looking shield and more to a form-fitted shield, and we're changing the way we're implementing shields in general. Instead of using these shield meshes all around, we're going to use the collision that's already there and kind of push that out and then create the shape of the ship from those collisions that we already have in place. So that's coming in the next month.