Will the new shield tech actually fix the holes in the ships?
TL;DRYes, the new shield tech uses a programmatically generated signed distance field instead of a mesh, so it should not have holes, unless the ship itself has holes.
Yes, it will. The new shield tech... so previously we had a mesh.
Every part of the ship has a duplicated, expanded mesh that is what detects the shield. As you can imagine, ships have lots of parts. It's easy for bits to not quite mesh together.
The way the new shield tech works is we have a thing called an SDF, which is a signed distance field. It is a field around the ship that encodes how far away every point is from the ship. And so using that, you could say, here's a bullet, and then ask this SDF how far away you are from a surface on the ship. And that's all calculated programmatically, dynamically. It's not a mesh. And so it's much more reliable at figuring that out, and it's not going to have any holes, because it's just programmatically generated from wherever the ship's shape is.
Unless the ship has holes.