Shields

I'm having trouble with shields. I have just recolored images of the ships I want the shields to be for so I somehow figured that the shields would be a slightly transparent version of that image(given that that is what happens with the shield images that I downloaded off of the add-ons page) but they just seem to be grainy at best and are never the right color. Am I missing a trick. Or maybe is it cause my shields are rlëDs?

If you have recolored sprites to use as shield images, that could be your problem. Basically, when something hits the shield sprite, the engine as I understand it adjusts the transparency of the shield sprite depending on the damage, shield strength, and impact. It might work better for you to take the sprite sheet and either build shields around the outside of the sprites, or to maybe take the masks and recolor the insides with whatever shield color you want. Probably putting the shields on the outside edges of the sprites would work best.

I haven't personally played with shields much, but this is what I've gathered from reverse engineering the shield plugins that are out there and the shields from the Delta Flyer plug-in that was put out by the STN:TFF team.

Ok, the ship outline thing worked best. Thanks for the tip. I just put the ship images in Photoshop and hit glowing edges then colorized them with the hue/saturation option and now it looks really tight.

@sp3cies, on Feb 20 2009, 03:59 PM, said in Shields:

Ok, the ship outline thing worked best. Thanks for the tip. I just put the ship images in Photoshop and hit glowing edges then colorized them with the hue/saturation option and now it looks really tight.

Sweet. Glad to be of service.