If you don't mind, send me an email sometime. I'd like to speak to you about this, I mentioned finding this post and information on this forum and my team is interested in this technology and we would like to help you perfect it and maybe even expand it. [email protected] Just uh.. I dunno, throw something in the subject to let me know you're from TLR forum.

Will do.

Yeah, I've been following this thread with great interest for some time now. If this works out, it could make for some great tactical space battles in any mod.
I might be interested in adding this to my single player MOD I'm working on.

Just post when you have improved/figured out how to work this properly, if you could please. Or my email and MSN is [email protected].

Regards,
Chesto

I find this very interesting. Although I believe you as there's no reason really why you'd lie, and that in-game picture looks real enough, I do have twin shields mounted on all my Very Heavy Fighters in 88 Flak. Granted, they're an Elite Shield and Fighter Shield mix, however in my experience they just act as one gigantic shield.

Perhaps it's an odd thing with the Armored Transport? (hey, maybe Digital Anvil had a little bit more in mind for it) I'll play around with it a bit when I have the time and see what I can dig up.

I agree with Flak here.
I created a rather huge TCS Midway and gave it 3 shields..a LF shield,Freighter Shield and a Elite shield and they all worked together as a super shield as it were.

This was what i decided to do rather than create a super shield which could be used for stuff i didn't want it to.

So perhaps this is a really longwinded way of doing

uhh

in the first picture up there..whats wrong with the $ sign's on the left!?!??!

Maybe it has somethign to do with him mounting it on the engine hardpoint for some reason...

It's all down to the shield_link, a SUR bubble is centered around the hardpoint for each shield you use, on smaller ships they're usually pretty close together giving you the stronger shields, but on the bigger ships they're usually spaced wide apart but overlap in places giving you the dual shields. To cover a big ship you would need to link 3 or more shield hardpoints as the biggest bubble belongs to the dromedary. To get this to work with smaller ships will require altering the SUR bubble for the shields.

Custom shield bubbles are possible as I have the armored transport and the liberty dreadnaught running around with thier own custom shield link and SUR bubble.

The shield bubble isn't the one in the ships SUR file, but rather the one in "bw_freighter_shield.sur" and the other files like it, the 3db of the same name is the hardpoint for attaching it.

**shuffles off with a new headache**

I think there are capital class shields somewhere in the .ini's. They just haven't been implemented. Also, there are "Armor Scales" which some ships use to beef up their hit points.

Perhaps it's how you use the shield_link variable?

For instance, in Flak, it's just the following:

<pre><font size=1 face=Courier>shield_link = cv_fighter6_shield01, HpMount, HpShield01, HpTurret01</font></pre> (HpTurret01 is the second shield, and all stock FLShips used HPMount as a shield_link, so I simply followed suit - perhaps removing HPMount will produce something useful?)

like i said at the beginning of that discussion ... the shield is based on the shield sphere... and a normal fighter has just one shield sphere
therefore just one shield

Bejaymac mentioned the only possible solution to this
multiple shield spheres in the sur
the only problem will be to adjust them so there is a front shield or a rear shield

basically i consider this whole topic a big mistake coz in pvp ppl will complain online if someone lost his shields but the hull still cant be scratched while another guy just has luck and makes hull damage because he accidentiallly hit the not protected part of a fighter

so noobs won't like having some developed skill they don't have (like turning the shielded side to the enemy) shoved under their nose? - on the contrary the spirit of the topic is right on(this is a great feature in WC) but i don't think it will be possible: although there are other ways of shielding something *hint hint - bonk!*

also, why not just have fore - or - aft shields, so you can only pick one?food for thought

This is what happens when you add more shield points to the shield_link, you get shield bubbles over lapping, I believe this is also what runtman has done. As I've already pointed out on small ships this over lapping isn't noticable as the hardpoints are close together, it's only the larger ships that have them spread about just like the picture.

By adding 2 shield hardpoints to the armored transports CMP, one on the left & one on the right and by using:-

shield_link = bw_freighter_shield01, HpMount, HpShield01, HpShield02
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_9, HpShield01, HpShield02
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_8, HpShield01, HpShield02
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_7, HpShield01, HpShield02

You get this, as you can see the shields don't cover all of the ship, this means either adding 3 or 4 shield hardpoints to the CMP and above code, or a custom SUR bubble so you only need the two in the above code. This can be done with the smaller ships, but every shield bubble would have to be redone as they're to big to work as they are.

@ rankor, it doesn't matter what the ini's say bud, if there isn't a "shipname_shield.3db & .sur" then there won't be a shield to fit a capship.

**shuffles off with a new headache**

Ok, so I dinked with this out of curiosity about a week and a half ago, but TLR disappeared right around then and only just came back. Anyway, I managed to predictably get the partial shield dropping behavior and figured I should share my findings.

First off, the setup. I dinked a bit with the Defender hardpoints; you will see the two I use (HpShield02 and HpRadar01, no significance behind name choices) marked by the red arrows in the first image later on.

I set up a solar object that used the defender model (no sense having my test subject fly off on me). The key part was the shield links, as has been suggested already:

shield_link = l_elite_shield01, HpShield02, HpShield02
shield_link = l_elite_shield01, HpRadar01, HpRadar01

Yes, two of them. Now, the format of the shield_link line is the following:

shield_link = shield, mount, hardpoint, ..., hardpoint

"shield" refers to a Shield definition in select_equip.ini, which in turn refers to a .3db file somewhere, which in turn has a shield bubble .sur attached to it (by name, like any .sur). "mount" is the hardpoint from where the above shield is placed; all vanilla Freelancer ships use HpMount, and if you look at the shield bubbles of most ships they are vertically off-center (since HpMount is below the ship). The one or more "hardpoints" are the hardpoints where the game will look to for stats regarding the shield; if you have multiple hardpoints listed here and mount a shield on each one, the game will simply add the stats together (at least capacity and regen, anyway).

But what if you have TWO (or more) shield links? Well, it turns out that Freelancer will actually treat them as separate shields, to a degree. The reason I set up the Defender the way I did was to make it easy to hit the different shields independently. Here is the setup, with HpShield02 and HpRadar01 pointed out and approximately where the shield bubbles are in space outlined:

Shield spheres and hardpoints

So, what happened? Well, if I shot the ship from the front, I could drop the shield and damage the hull while the second shield remained up:

Shooting through shields

However, shooting the ship from behind gave different behavior. The shield definitely collapsed, since my shots landed directly on the hull, but the damage was still dealt to the ship's shield health rather than hull health. This was actually not suprising (at least not to me); Freelancer will count hits against the hull or any mounted equipment as hits against the shield if it still thinks the shields are up.

The important piece of information is that the front shield bubble corresponded to the first shield_link entry. Switching the order switched the behaviors of the front and back shields. In other words, only the first shield_link entry will exhibit the "drop independently" behavior. I also tried adding additional shield_links, and expectedly there was no change in result.

In short, real sectional shielding isn't going to work without some other trick.

Edit: and in my 4 AM-dazed state, I forgot to make the links actually link.

Edited by - Dev on 5/22/2007 3:59:35 AM