Any plans for a shield effects rework?
TL;DRA shield effects rework is planned eventually using signed distance fields, so shields would follow a ship's actual damaged shape rather than showing ghost wings.
Yes. The current shields are not done by the VFX department, but with the signed distance field, we will eventually take another stab at it. Not another, our first stab at it. So the new thing that we can do: if you fly a ship, someone shoots both your wings off and then hits you again, the new shield will take the actual current shape of your ship. So the shield would no longer show like a ghost wing or two ghost wings.
Using the signed distance field.
Yeah. So the signed distance field is the best way for us to get the shape of a ship. Normally it's often done with a low poly mesh, but the signed distance field suits particle work even more.
But that shows how generic those things are. I mean, maybe generic is not the right word, but they are very flexible. We can use them for sonic booms, we can use them for new shields, we can use them for atmospheric entry. Having one technology, we can do that much.
It's a big problem for atmospheric entries. You have this ship coming in, but maybe it has this shape on it, and then you have another ship that looks like this. So we want to have a system that we can apply to every ship, because it's not feasible for us to make a custom atmospheric entry effect for every ship. But a signed distance field would allow us to get this shape and especially design it so we can spawn glow particles from here and from the wings or whatever. That would be very difficult to do without.