Another take at the bubble shield stuff

[YellowMiner]

Warning : Huge wall of text.

I tried to pump enough air in the thing get it to a readable state, but it's still heavy.

Before you say "screw this, i'll never read all that, and there's no way for bubble shields to not suck" as it seems to be the average reaction when seeing a wall of text (quite understandable), i want to precise that this is a completely redone suggestion and the concept of the bubble shield is the only thing it shares with all previous suggestions on this same subject. So please read the thing (or at least the soon to come summary) before complaining.

Edit : forget what was there, i'm going to write a summary. Should make it easier if you don't feel like reading it all. But it won't be very accurate regarding to the contents of the post, as many details i will skip are inportant to justify the changes.

Summary here :

Spoiler

Have 2 shields, the main shield will be the bubble shield and a inner shield working like the current one :

• Turn the main shield into a bubble shield, boxy to not lag and placed at a distance from the ship "box".
  • Minimal distance from the ship increases with size of the ship and power of the shields, can then be increased from the structure panel/using logic. Max distance calculated the same way. Would allow ships to be designed to project a shield around a fleet.
  • Covers turrets, stopping them from being obliterated by larger ships in seconds and requiring shields of their own filling some much needed space, so they could be actually useful, and full turret based weapons be viable.
  • Smaller ships can slip under it, so they can be useful and capable of attacking large ships, or damaging them (kill the turrets fo example) to help the rest of the fleet to take them down.
• Then we add the inner shield, working as the currents shields. It has it's own HP bar.
  • It's main purpose is to portect against small ships, so that while large ships will have to take down the whole shields, small ones avoiding the main shields can't still damage the ship without having enough firepower to break them, making necessary for small ships to act in numbers if they want to attack large ships. This way, small ships can be uuseful at attacking larger ships but in a coherent way, without the nonsense of a single small ship killing a capital ship, but a group will be much more effective than they currently are.
  • We set a % of the shield capacity and recharge to go in instead of the mains hield, but providing less shielding for the amount of shields blocks you put in than if you put them in the main shield, so maxing this shield to protect like shields currently do will leave you with much less shielding for the block count.
  • Turrets are covered by this inner shield. Again, so they don't need in built shields, and so they are considered like the rest of the hull, and not a separate entity that a lone fighter could take down turrets easily as it does now without worrying about the inner shield and the firepower requirement it create to prevent this happening.

Ok i think that's all the most important stuff. If you want details and all the side ideas wich goes with it, read the whole post.

Moved the (not complete) main pros/cons list here, include stuff that's not in the summary :

Spoiler

Here's all the good points of this new system :

• Looks cool.
• Protects turrets from large ships.
• Make it easier for small ships to take on capital ships, and if not to destroy them, at least to weaken them before allied large ships finish the crippled ship, but only if in numbers.
• No longer mpacts performance too much since te shield is now a box and not a sphere.
• Allow more control on how you setup your shields.
• Make shield ships to cover a entiere fleet possible.

And the bad ones :

• Will still impact performance more than the current system.
• Some stuff with the collision mechanics could be complicated.
• Shield size recalculation issues as the ship takes damage?
• May (will) be more stuff but i can't find it. Well you're all going to point it out anyway.

I had the idea for this since weeks but never feelt like sitting down to write it, and now it's a bit late, as it would have been more appropriate when there was this discussion on the turret thread about how the turrets were too vulnerable, wich turned into a debate about shields and if they should cover turrets. Hopefully this redone bubble shield system should solve those issues.
And i totally know how much evryone hates the bubble shields, but hear me first then you can hate as much as you want. (And the disagree rating is out anyway so there's not too much risks of return fire (*troll laugh*)

(Also, if you want to skip the tiny RP part, just go straight to the wall of text in white (and no, i'm not putting that in a spoiler because it's only introduction text and noone would take a look at it (such a jerk move)), i just had fun writing it)

- Me :

*Stands on the scene of the suggestions conference room 2 of the Shine HQ station in front of a crowd of pepole showing "limited" interest about the subject*

Hi evryone, and welcome to this 27th conference about refurbishing the shields system.

I'm here to show how we could reuse the bubble sh- *gets interrupted*​

- Community :

*disapproval noises*
- Nah it suuuuuuuuucks!
- This has been oversuggested and evry time we concluded that it was bad in evry possible way, performance, gameplay, things beccoming OP, we can't let that happen.
- How can you even stick to such a bad idea, you must be a complete retard to not get that it'll ruin the game.
- Now shut up and get out of here.
*fires the flak guns*
*Shots misses and go through the back wall, then a group of somewhat surprised employees in the backstage can be heard wondering why their cofee machine at the back of the room suddently exploded*​

- Me :

Calm down guys, this time it's completely different of the stuff that has been suggested until now.​

First off, the shield system itself :

So this shield system will have the bubble shield that we all know and hate, and a "undershield" working a lot like the shields we currently have.

The bubble shields will work a lot like how they used to in all older suggestions about them. A big shield wrapped around and not on the ship. But to solve one of the big issues with them, rendering the awful round surface of 9001 polygons (and calculating the impacts spots), we just turn the thing in a nice, square box (for now, shema can always improve it later as he makes the game more efficient) and wrap it around the box dimensions of the ship.

Now, the main point of this shield is to be at some distance of the hull, so to not give a advantage to doomcubes filling their bodims perfectly, this shield will be at a some distance of the ship box, with a minimum of at least [whatever is the most appropriate] on the smallest ships and then scale either with the ship size or the shields strength (or a mix of the 2). This distance should be only the minimal distance, then the same data should be used to calculate a maximum distance, and while by default the minimum distance will be used, the player can set whatever distance in between those 2 in the structure tab (wirable with logic in some way to change it on the fly maybe?).

Why would you have a shild that's further from your hull? So this way we can have capital ships or even specialised shield ships projecting a large shield around an entiere fleet, leading to some interesting gameplay elements. Of course this is where the max distance becomes important, as it will require a shield that's properly scaled to the size of the fleet, and smaller ships will be able to cover only a part of said fleet.

Spoiler

Cheaty tactics/ how to abuse that :

You can hide a part of the fleet out of but behind the shield, but you're not protected if you get flanked, wich is fairly easy in space.
You can try to cram the fleet in the shield, as normal use would suppose leaving enough space between ships for them to maneuver and fire, but then the numerous collisions will kick them out of here anyway, and they're blocking each other from firing.
And finally if you've a large enough fleet to fill the shield, then it's likely because you're opposed to a similarly scaled fleet, and that small shield won't last long against their sustained fire.

(Also, how the hell do i name those spoilers (Forum mechanics, how do they work?))

This shield would of course cover turrets (as anything inside the shields, so docked ships too), wich is very important, as it will stop them from getting killed in the first seconds of the battle in large ships engagements (typically all at once by a single nuke missile, or sometie by small missiles), since they don't have the space to have significant shields unless they're huge, so they can actually be useful, and using mostly turret-based weapons on capital ships would actually be a viable possibility. (And the fixed weapons on ships and evry other system are protected by the shields anyway, so why should the turrets be considered differently? Because they can shoot in different directions that the others weapons? A set of tracking (heatseekers or lock-on, either works) missiles oriented to the side/rear/top/bottom can do that well with shield protection (but you may need a player crewmemeber to operate them))

This would of course mean you don't need shields on your turrets, wich is very useful especially on the smaller ones, wich often lack the space to have decent shields if you give them proper weaponery (and with the weapon update, you need not only the main weapon system, but also in most cases the slave weapon system and the effect system, needing a significant amount of space, and each of those needs a computer, so the computer to weapon block ratio can become quite important on very small turrets, resulting in no real space to fill any with significant shields), unless you fill the whole docking space with blocks resulting in doomcube turrets, something we want to avoid.
Not needing shields on turrets would at least result in building small turrets being effective in combat and looking good becoming significantly easier.​

One of the main points of the bubble shield is letting fighters and other small ships (depending of the size of the shields and as a result, of the ship) get under it and avoid to have to take down the main shields to attack the ship, effectively making fighters (and mostly bombers, fighters are to help take those down in large fleets) useful at atacking capital ships (if they don't get killed by the turrets, of course), and if not to destroy them, they can at least take down turrets (that large ships can no longer destroy easily before the shields are down) and others subsystems to help their fleet finish it. This would help in small ship and large ship balance, as small ships are currently useless against large ships.

But now we're running into the opposite issue, a small ship managing to get in a blindspot of the turrets (or manage to kill them before being destroyed) can eventually destroy capital ships.

Spoiler

There's a lot of debate on the forums about large/small ship balance.

Currently, the bigger the ship is, the more OP it is, and anything smaller will lose at combat, (unless the large one is really poorly designed orthe pilot has no idea of what he's doing). I was about to say "even in numbers", but the recenet drone swarm experiments have shown that it is kinda false. It fact, the very vulnerable turrets mean that a large ship without a "hull mounted machine gun" or tracking missiles in numbers (or said machine gun in a very large turret wich can actually have proper shields) will have a lot of difficulty dealing with a group of small ships. But the poor AI mechanics (no way to get them back in the carrier and bad combat skills) and the lack of enough players to pilot all the fighters (and carrier respawn points) in most factions mean that those strategies can only be used effectively by using drones, and not bothering picking them up after the fight.

The community is divided between the one saying that a fighter killing a capital ship make no sense, and that small ships should be more useful, but mostly in numbers, and the ones who want small ships to have enough of a advantage over large ships for size to not make a difference, or even nerf large ships to the point that it is preferential to use small ones.
They also say that large ships take more effort to build and those players should be rewarded by a more effective ship (kinda true, but a large doomcube is really easy to set up with 10x10x10 block placement)
And of course the ones who said that it's just about getting the economy (and instant-spawn blueprint system (shema. shipyards. now.)) to be balanced so that getting a larger ship is actually more difficult than getting a small one, eventually leading to larger ships to be more rare and valuable for this reason, and fleets actually being made of ships of all sizes (that the faction can afford) instead of only capitals.
(can you see my biaised opinion through these paragraphs? if you don't, it's just down there)

I would personally say that a ship should not be able to get killed by a ship under half it's mass in a 1v1 engagement, but groups of small ships should have no trouble killing a large one (we've of couse talking about proper warships here. A poorly armed and shielded freighter could and should die to pirate fighters easily), or at least crippling it by killing turrets and engines to help the rest of their fleet. Economy should, as said before, balance the numbers of small and large ships in the game.

So to solve this, i introduce the undershield. basically, in addition to the main bubble shield, you have another shield on the surface of the blocks, like they are currently. This shield would have it's own HP bar, separate of the main shield HP. Taking one down leave the other one acrtive.

The main purpose of this shield is to prevent the ships going under the main shield to immediately start dealing damage. It would of course cover turrets too (and docked ships), unlike the current ones. The idea is that while small ships can get under there, this shield will make necessary to have enough firepower in there to do damage to the capital ship, in other words, smaller ships can avoid the main shields, but must be in sufficient numbers to actually cause damage to the capital ship.​

This leads to the wanted effect : a single small ship can't kill a capital ship, but a group of them can (or cripple it by killing turrets and subsystems so the rest of the fleet can kill it easily). And large ships can kill it too, but they need to take down the main shield first, like they do in the current game.

Of course this shield scale with the size of the main shields, so the bigger the ship and it's shields are, the more fighters and bombers you will need there, or, if the ship is large enough, you can get larger ships in there.

The undershield needs to be balanced, because if too weak, small ships have a huge advantage and if too strong, it will be like it currently is, with fighters not being able to get through the shields.

Now, we should be able to set (in the structure tab?) wich percentage of shields we dedicate to the inner shield and wich percentage goes to the main shield (eventually the percentage of capacity and the percentage of recharge, so we can have a strong main shield, and a quickly regenerating inner one). so we can choose how we want to balance the protection of the ship against large to small ships, maybe with a default 10% on the inner shield (number debatable). Now, players shouldn't be able ot just put it all in the inner shield, resulting in shields like they are now.

The idea i have is that instead of a hard cap on the percentage of shields allowed in the inner shields (would result in evry ship using this max percentage), but instead have the shields allocated to the inner shield either :

- Return significantly less shield regen/capacity than they would on the main shield, like 50% (number debatable). Will need a lot of balancing as it may lead to the inner shield to be too weak with too small numbers, requiring to divert more shields in it, and making it actually protect from fighters require to loose most of your main shields, or to be too powerful with too large numbers, making putting it all in there viable.
- Return a smaller and smaller percentage of the allocated shields as the inner shield percentage of allocated blocks gets bigger (better?), resulting in small inner shields using close to their full power (linear? : 90% for 10% shields allocated in and 95% for 5%, ... ? Find the math that's the most balanced. Open to suggestions.), but putting more and more shields in the inner shield lowering significantly your overall shields, so putting it all in the inner shield is not viable. The curve should start decreasing from the start, because if you can put a part of your shields in the inner shield without drawbacks up to some percentage, then putting less than it in would be just useless.​

Anyway, wichever way is choosen, the more shields you put in the undershield and the more protection you have against fighters ignoring the main shield, but the less global shielding you have, and the less protection against large ships you have.
(maybe buff the shields blocks so that the global shields (main+inner) have roughly the same value as they did before for the default percentage of shields allocated to the inner shield, or else ships getting updated will have losses of shields between before and after the update)
RP excuse : Bending the shields to get around the details of the ship is unstable, cauing part of the shielding field to escape and so cause significant losses in their power, or something like that.

So you can have a ship using it's shields to max power but not having any serious protection against fighters (would be useful for the fleet-covering shields ships i talked about before, and also fighters and other small ships wich don't have enough space to risk anything getting under anyway), or you can put it all in the inner shield resulting in great close protection but much less overall shields (bad idea, a capital ship will make short work of you).

Of course transfering shields from the outer to inner shields should not be possible in combat, so you can't adjust your protection against fighters or caps ships depending of fhat is in front of you on the fly. This can be done with a huge cooldown as a placeholder, but the best would be to allow it only when the ship is away of all ennemies, or even better, docked in a shipyard (wich could be required to modify paraeters of any ship system, though it could be annoying when you want to fix stuff on the field. But definitely the kind of stuf that would fit for the undershield ratio (debatable))

Spoiler

The inner shield does create a problem : A outer shield only system has the advantage there is no shields inside the ship, so bording parties (should be a thing, but currently it's kinda impossible to board a ship) can freely blow walls up. With the undershield, we have the same issue that we have with the current shields, wich is shields inside the ship, just that they will be significantly weaker. The best way to fix this would be to have the game know if a air block is on the inside or outside of the ship, preferrentially by introducing actual air blocks to fill it in, allowing to add proper life supports stuff in the game. But i'm getting off topic. We can also help boarding parties by introducing a handheld (and maybe a ship version for boarding ships?) tool (Plasma cutter? whatever wich cuts at short range and feels spacey) to destroy blocks from others factions (in a significant amount of time) while ignoring shields. (Could cause griefing issues, as it is quite easier to use it to steal a ship that by shooting it until the faction module gets destroyed)

Now we're left with a major issue : we don't want a large ship moving close to get the end of it's guns in the bubble and avoid the shields. This could be solved in different ways, like causing heavy damage to any ship placed partially on the shield border along said border if it stays there for too long (or only ships bigger in one of their box dimentions than the capital ship box to shield box distance, but it could lead to issues in carriers, unless we could turn the shields of the docked ship off (but would be tedious), see paragraph on turing shields off), or preventing a ship wich is partially on the shield border to fire weapons with their output situated inside the shields (more carrier friendly, the biggest issue would be to detect where the weapon output is relative to the shields and if the ship is partially in). Or anything else wich works (Open to sugestions).
(or we could just allow it, and it's to the pilot to be careful to not the ennemy get too close, and collsion damage would be enough for the pilot of the other ship to not try this maneuver)
Shields could protect against collision damage (Well, they protect against missiles and other kinetic damage), (In case you don't know, there is collision damage in the game, it is just highly experimental, and disabled by default on the config, but we can suppose it will be fully added once it will be done) wich would help a lot when docking stuff in carriers, as well as protect against ramming wich otherwise would be really powerful if it ignores shields, or just protect against collisions with asteroids or space debris. Collision damage with the main bubble shield would wok differently than with the ship. There would be of course a minimal speed to take damage on collision with the shield, could be the speed to get damage when colliding with a normal solid object, but i would prefer a signficantly higher one, as fighters and other small ships (boarding ships, disentegrator torpedoes, ...) need to be able to get under it without slowing down too much.

Stuff colliding with the bubble shield would take collision damage while the shield take the same amount of damage, and get slowed down, but not stopped. If the bubble shield goes down, it would stop having a collision box.

Stuff colliding with the hull would get damaged as it currently is, but the undershield, if active, would take either part of the damage and transfer the rest to the blocks, or full damage and protect the blocks (debatable). Since i suggest the main shield collision speed to be higher that the speed required to get damage when colliding with blocks, the undershield could use a similar system, leaving a range of speeds where the blocks will be damage without damage being absorbed by the shields, or we could have the damage absorption start at the block damage speed, but then it would not feel coherent with the other collision speed, but it coud be better for docking and gameplay in general. So it it debatable too.

Like with how it stops shots, the outer shield cause collision damage only when going in, not out.​

So this is all the most important stuff about the shields, now the random stuff :

We could have some kinds of weapons (punch-through/piercing? or something completely different.) wich would go through the shields (the bubble one, at least), losing a variable part of their damage (depending of the shield strenght relative to the weapon strenght). Could be a terrible idea though. Debatable.

Since we have 2 shields, shield transfer beams could either draw/output in the shield they're hitting or the 2 at the same time. Debatable.​

The display blocks can be used to show how many shields you have, we could keep that for the total shielding (main+undershield) and add 2 separate text bits (how do you call those?) to display separately the main and inner shields.​

Add a shield frame for hangars doors? Make a loop like with gates and you get a shield in, wich is either fully decorative, or has roughly the properties of the bubble shield (especially in term of collisions) and link it to shield gnerator and capacitor blocks to get it to work, has the shielding and regeneration provided by the linked blocks. Don't need a shield bar on the hud, but we could use display blocks to see the current shielding in. As the outer shield, we could give it a inner and outer side, so it stops stuff only one way. Should be toggleable on/off with logic.​

We could have a way to turn shields off, to save power (Do they even use power, or is it only when they regenerate? Should be full time.), or do whatever you wnat to do with shields off (like ships in carriers.).​

The shields could use a longer cooldown once they're down. at least 5 seconds on the smallest ships, up to a minute or so on the biggest. With the current system, they're back up as soon as you stop shooting. Once they're down it's no longer relevant to this topic, it's just about making armor useful (I wish you could go with armor as your primary defence system instead of having it only as a (terrible) backup if shields fail), systems explode when damaged enough and get rid of core drilling.​

Link shields to a light (or any other way wich works) to get them take the colour you want. Most shields in sci-fi are blue, but there's still plenty of yellow ones.​

The system should work on stations like on ships, not sure for the planets however, but we should find a way. Open to suggestions.

Edit : forgot this one :
We could use a "shield projector block" for planets and eventually some specific applications on ships and stations. You link it with shield generators and capacitors, and then set the bubble box dims (can use a min and max value system like the main shield, or just extenders like docks), and it create it's own shield bubble centered on itself, independent from any other shield you would have (like others bubbles) Possible uses include :

• With a bunch of those, you could setup a modular shielding system protecting each ship section individually. Could add a lot to ship design.
• Emerency shields for important areas (core room, bridge, AI core room if you have one, ...). Would not be OP, as it's not more shields to kill before reaching the area, since there's the same shield amount by shield blocks on the ship ratio, it's just in 2 separate shields to kill individually. Don't use more firepower, just looks cool and surprise the attacker.

Ok i think i'm done. I may add more to this as i remember all the stuff i wanted to write there (I've been writing and figuring stuff out for 5 hours now, kinda forgot the ideas i had at the beggining).

 

[SomethingSlimy]

I think I'd prefer turrets still needing their own "undershield." It means fighters are better at getting in close and taking them out. And if turrets all shared the same shield with the ship, then all their shields would go down at once, and fighters could take out all the turrets without anymore of a challenge.

"Global shields" do sound interesting though. Instead of choosing what % of shields go to where though, there could be new "shield generator" blocks that work together in a group, and the current shields could be renamed to "deflector screen capacitator" or something.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

TL; DR. Just rated it old.

 

[Krosulhah]

It shouldn't be rated old, just because you're too lazy to read.
That's down on you, not him.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Anything trying to add bubble shields is old. I just said it was too long, because, well, it was too long. You don't seriously expect me to read that post when it is about bubble shields, right? This topic has been discussed to death. Any attempt to post something new on that is futile. We had them before, they got removed, and we're not going to get them back.

 

[Krosulhah]

I believe that all suggestions should at least be fully read, before someone just says "Hurr durr, nu add". For all you know, he could have said something that would actually make the shields better, than the current ones.

 

[therimmer96]

*while reading this post*
You put some effort into this, well done, rather than just spewing some generic shit about shields, fucking counter-arguments 'n' all, well done

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

It shouldn't be rated old, just because you're too lazy to read.
That's down on you, not him.

The first post comes in at over 30 paragraphs. It's a legitimate reason to not like the post, and there isn't a button to say "long-winded" or "a bad idea".

Ultimately, if the bubble shield's anything but vaguely round, I'm against it. I don't want a big ugly box around my ships.

You're perfectly capable of protecting ships with your own as is. That's the whole point of doors being able to be made as large as you want.
Relatedly, if there were blocks like glass doors, but with a special effect for a texture, and that let friendly weapons fire pass through even while the door is turned on, that would effectively allow you to make bubble shields on your ship (although you'd have to replace missing spots after battles).

 

[therimmer96]

The first post comes in at over 30 paragraphs. It's a legitimate reason to not like the post, and there isn't a button to say "long-winded" or "a bad idea".

for those who feel any huge block of text requires a tl;dr, please see http://stilldrinking.org/the-big-truth

tl;dr

the information you might care about will never be in the summary, and if you just want the summary, you don't care about the information.

 

[SomethingSlimy]

the information you might care about will never be in the summary, and if you just want the summary, you don't care about the information.

The op should put the important information in the summary, otherwise, it's not a good summary. And we all know what the important information is - why it would work, where other suggestions like this have not.

 

[YellowMiner]

I think I'd prefer turrets still needing their own "undershield." It means fighters are better at getting in close and taking them out. And if turrets all shared the same shield with the ship, then all their shields would go down at once, and fighters could take out all the turrets without anymore of a challenge.

"Global shields" do sound interesting though. Instead of choosing what % of shields go to where though, there could be new "shield generator" blocks that work together in a group, and the current shields could be renamed to "deflector screen capacitator" or something.

Well one of the objectives of this shield system is to move shields out of the turrets. Designing a small turret with any kind of serious shielding and weapons while still looking good is currently a huge pain. Removing the undershield for turrets would mean a single fighter can damage a capital ship, wich is something to avoid. The whole point of the undershield is to put a minimal amount of small ships to take on a large ship. If the turrets don't share it, then we're back at the current system. I don't know what to say about the "all turrets shields going down at the smae time" part, but i don't think it is a bad thing. If you think it could be too easy to shoot them down then, remember it's only about how you design your ship, as you can still have shields on your turrets working independently of the ship ones.

TL; DR. Just rated it old.

So nice from you. Comming on a thread just to say "I didn't read lol"

Anything trying to add bubble shields is old. I just said it was too long, because, well, it was too long. You don't seriously expect me to read that post when it is about bubble shields, right? This topic has been discussed to death. Any attempt to post something new on that is futile. We had them before, they got removed, and we're not going to get them back.

The topic may have been discussed to death, but there was still a lot of room for improvement. That's why i made a huge post, to explain the whole thing in details, and how it would be very different from all the bubble shield suggestions we have seen until now.

*while reading this post*
You put some effort into this, well done, rather than just spewing some generic shit about shields, fucking counter-arguments 'n' all, well done

Thanks. (No sarcasm this time.)

The op should put the important information in the summary, otherwise, it's not a good summary. And we all know what the important information is - why it would work, where other suggestions like this have not.

I spent 5 hours writing the post, i was quite tired and did not felt like making a summary. The end bit is not a summary, it's just to show what it would improve.

I may try to make a summary of the thing wen i'll have some time, i guess, but i'm not too sure of how to compress it all and what to keep or throw. Summaries aren't my thing.
And ad a few pieces and bits that i forgot to the first post, as well as make the top of the thread more clear.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Reading the first bit; don't like that the shield is around the box dimensions. It makes the game even more cube-like.
Read the whole first part, like how you have two different shields, might cause some performance problems though.
Do like how the shields now cover turrets too. I also realise that you put some effort into this, but I still don't like the suggestion, so sorry, rating stays.

Just some flaws I found:

• If a ship has a of 'sticks' in certain directions, having them get shot would make the shield have to update, a lot. Might (actually, it most certainly will) cause lots of performance issues.
• Cube ships will have an even bigger advantage than before, as normal ships would have areas with lots of room under the shield.

The good things:

• The shields cover turrets.
• More RP elements.

Unfortunately that doesn't outweigh the certain massive lag that will be cause by all this

I too used to dream of shields like this, but I eventually realised that all the people complaining that it wouldn't work were right. I guess I'm just trying to say

SORRY

 

[YellowMiner]

Reading the first bit; don't like that the shield is around the box dimensions. It makes the game even more cube-like.

Well it's the only way i see to not have it be laggy. Of course, it can be changed to a low poly sphere if the game performance allows it, or improved over time as shema optimizes the game. But the box works well and calculating the optimal distance from the ship for gameplay is easier.

Just some flaws I found:

• If a ship has a of 'sticks' in certain directions, having them get shot would make the shield have to update, a lot. Might (actually, it most certainly will) cause lots of performance issues.
• Cube ships will have an even bigger advantage than before, as normal ships would have areas with lots of room under the shield.

For the sticks, i suppose the shield size can be saved whe exiting buildmode, and only be recaluclated out of buildmode if shield blocks get placed/removed by hand (give it a delay, to recalculate only when the player got the time to place a good amount of blocks and not do so for evry block placed, or the ship box size get modified by hand (again delay). Blocks destroyed in combat don't cause recalculations.

As i said, the shields have a minimum distance from the box to not give cube ships an advantage. It should be fairly large for the space between the hull and the box edge not be too significant relative to the box to shields distance. But it can vary a lot between hull designs so it may not be the best fix. Now if someone has a better idea feel free to contribute, my solution can reduce the problem but maybe not fix it.

Unfortunately that doesn't outweigh the certain massive lag that will be cause by all this

well it was designed with lag in mind, to not be too bad but then it's all shema's work. I can't say anything about that. It will be more ressource consuming than the current system. But it should be better than what older bubble shield suggestions would have created.

SORRY

Thx. That's no problem. Can i pet the bunny?

 

[SomethingSlimy]

Reading the first bit; don't like that the shield is around the box dimensions. It makes the game even more cube-like.

That is a good point. I love how wedges and Kupu's amazing textures make the game less blocky. (if only I could say the same for interiors!)

Maybe dodecahedron shields. :P But I don't know how badly that would kill performance.

 

[bugy855]

Warning : Huge wall of text.

I tried to pump enough air in the thing get it to a readable state, but it's still heavy.

Before you say "screw this, i'll never read all that, and there's no way for bubble shields to not suck" as it seems to be the average reaction when seeing a wall of text (quite understandable), i want to precise that this is a completely redone suggestion and the concept of the bubble shield is the only thing it shares with all previous suggestions on this same subject. So please read the thing (or at least the soon to come summary) before complaining.

Edit : forget what was there, i'm going to write a summary. Should make it easier if you don't feel like reading it all. But it won't be very accurate regarding to the contents of the post, as many details i will skip are inportant to justify the changes.

Summary here :

Spoiler

Have 2 shields, the main shield will be the bubble shield and a inner shield working like the current one :

• Turn the main shield into a bubble shield, boxy to not lag and placed at a distance from the ship "box".
  • Minimal distance from the ship increases with size of the ship and power of the shields, can then be increased from the structure panel/using logic. Max distance calculated the same way. Would allow ships to be designed to project a shield around a fleet.
  • Covers turrets, stopping them from being obliterated by larger ships in seconds and requiring shields of their own filling some much needed space, so they could be actually useful, and full turret based weapons be viable.
  • Smaller ships can slip under it, so they can be useful and capable of attacking large ships, or damaging them (kill the turrets fo example) to help the rest of the fleet to take them down.
• Then we add the inner shield, working as the currents shields. It has it's own HP bar.
  • It's main purpose is to portect against small ships, so that while large ships will have to take down the whole shields, small ones avoiding the main shields can't still damage the ship without having enough firepower to break them, making necessary for small ships to act in numbers if they want to attack large ships. This way, small ships can be uuseful at attacking larger ships but in a coherent way, without the nonsense of a single small ship killing a capital ship, but a group will be much more effective than they currently are.
  • We set a % of the shield capacity and recharge to go in instead of the mains hield, but providing less shielding for the amount of shields blocks you put in than if you put them in the main shield, so maxing this shield to protect like shields currently do will leave you with much less shielding for the block count.
  • Turrets are covered by this inner shield. Again, so they don't need in built shields, and so they are considered like the rest of the hull, and not a separate entity that a lone fighter could take down turrets easily as it does now without worrying about the inner shield and the firepower requirement it create to prevent this happening.

Ok i think that's all the most important stuff. If you want details and all the side ideas wich goes with it, read the whole post.

Moved the (not complete) main pros/cons list here, include stuff that's not in the summary :

Spoiler

Here's all the good points of this new system :

Spoiler

• Looks cool.
• Protects turrets from large ships.
• Make it easier for small ships to take on capital ships, and if not to destroy them, at least to weaken them before allied large ships finish the crippled ship, but only if in numbers.
• No longer mpacts performance too much since te shield is now a box and not a sphere.
• Allow more control on how you setup your shields.
• Make shield ships to cover a entiere fleet possible.

And the bad ones :

• Will still impact performance more than the current system.
• Some stuff with the collision mechanics could be complicated.
• Shield size recalculation issues as the ship takes damage?
• May (will) be more stuff but i can't find it. Well you're all going to point it out anyway.

I had the idea for this since weeks but never feelt like sitting down to write it, and now it's a bit late, as it would have been more appropriate when there was this discussion on the turret thread about how the turrets were too vulnerable, wich turned into a debate about shields and if they should cover turrets. Hopefully this redone bubble shield system should solve those issues.
And i totally know how much evryone hates the bubble shields, but hear me first then you can hate as much as you want. (And the disagree rating is out anyway so there's not too much risks of return fire (*troll laugh*)

(Also, if you want to skip the tiny RP part, just go straight to the wall of text in white (and no, i'm not putting that in a spoiler because it's only introduction text and noone would take a look at it (such a jerk move)), i just had fun writing it)

- Me :

*Stands on the scene of the suggestions conference room 2 of the Shine HQ station in front of a crowd of pepole showing "limited" interest about the subject*

Hi evryone, and welcome to this 27th conference about refurbishing the shields system.

I'm here to show how we could reuse the bubble sh- *gets interrupted*​

- Community :

*disapproval noises*
- Nah it suuuuuuuuucks!
- This has been oversuggested and evry time we concluded that it was bad in evry possible way, performance, gameplay, things beccoming OP, we can't let that happen.
- How can you even stick to such a bad idea, you must be a complete retard to not get that it'll ruin the game.
- Now shut up and get out of here.
*fires the flak guns*
*Shots misses and go through the back wall, then a group of somewhat surprised employees in the backstage can be heard wondering why their cofee machine at the back of the room suddently exploded*​

- Me :

Calm down guys, this time it's completely different of the stuff that has been suggested until now.​

First off, the shield system itself :

So this shield system will have the bubble shield that we all know and hate, and a "undershield" working a lot like the shields we currently have.

The bubble shields will work a lot like how they used to in all older suggestions about them. A big shield wrapped around and not on the ship. But to solve one of the big issues with them, rendering the awful round surface of 9001 polygons (and calculating the impacts spots), we just turn the thing in a nice, square box (for now, shema can always improve it later as he makes the game more efficient) and wrap it around the box dimensions of the ship.

Now, the main point of this shield is to be at some distance of the hull, so to not give a advantage to doomcubes filling their bodims perfectly, this shield will be at a some distance of the ship box, with a minimum of at least [whatever is the most appropriate] on the smallest ships and then scale either with the ship size or the shields strength (or a mix of the 2). This distance should be only the minimal distance, then the same data should be used to calculate a maximum distance, and while by default the minimum distance will be used, the player can set whatever distance in between those 2 in the structure tab (wirable with logic in some way to change it on the fly maybe?).

Why would you have a shild that's further from your hull? So this way we can have capital ships or even specialised shield ships projecting a large shield around an entiere fleet, leading to some interesting gameplay elements. Of course this is where the max distance becomes important, as it will require a shield that's properly scaled to the size of the fleet, and smaller ships will be able to cover only a part of said fleet.

Spoiler

Cheaty tactics/ how to abuse that :

You can hide a part of the fleet out of but behind the shield, but you're not protected if you get flanked, wich is fairly easy in space.
You can try to cram the fleet in the shield, as normal use would suppose leaving enough space between ships for them to maneuver and fire, but then the numerous collisions will kick them out of here anyway, and they're blocking each other from firing.
And finally if you've a large enough fleet to fill the shield, then it's likely because you're opposed to a similarly scaled fleet, and that small shield won't last long against their sustained fire.

(Also, how the hell do i name those spoilers (Forum mechanics, how do they work?))

This shield would of course cover turrets (as anything inside the shields, so docked ships too), wich is very important, as it will stop them from getting killed in the first seconds of the battle in large ships engagements (typically all at once by a single nuke missile, or sometie by small missiles), since they don't have the space to have significant shields unless they're huge, so they can actually be useful, and using mostly turret-based weapons on capital ships would actually be a viable possibility. (And the fixed weapons on ships and evry other system are protected by the shields anyway, so why should the turrets be considered differently? Because they can shoot in different directions that the others weapons? A set of tracking (heatseekers or lock-on, either works) missiles oriented to the side/rear/top/bottom can do that well with shield protection (but you may need a player crewmemeber to operate them))

This would of course mean you don't need shields on your turrets, wich is very useful especially on the smaller ones, wich often lack the space to have decent shields if you give them proper weaponery (and with the weapon update, you need not only the main weapon system, but also in most cases the slave weapon system and the effect system, needing a significant amount of space, and each of those needs a computer, so the computer to weapon block ratio can become quite important on very small turrets, resulting in no real space to fill any with significant shields), unless you fill the whole docking space with blocks resulting in doomcube turrets, something we want to avoid.
Not needing shields on turrets would at least result in building small turrets being effective in combat and looking good becoming significantly easier.​

One of the main points of the bubble shield is letting fighters and other small ships (depending of the size of the shields and as a result, of the ship) get under it and avoid to have to take down the main shields to attack the ship, effectively making fighters (and mostly bombers, fighters are to help take those down in large fleets) useful at atacking capital ships (if they don't get killed by the turrets, of course), and if not to destroy them, they can at least take down turrets (that large ships can no longer destroy easily before the shields are down) and others subsystems to help their fleet finish it. This would help in small ship and large ship balance, as small ships are currently useless against large ships.

But now we're running into the opposite issue, a small ship managing to get in a blindspot of the turrets (or manage to kill them before being destroyed) can eventually destroy capital ships.

Spoiler

There's a lot of debate on the forums about large/small ship balance.

Currently, the bigger the ship is, the more OP it is, and anything smaller will lose at combat, (unless the large one is really poorly designed orthe pilot has no idea of what he's doing). I was about to say "even in numbers", but the recenet drone swarm experiments have shown that it is kinda false. It fact, the very vulnerable turrets mean that a large ship without a "hull mounted machine gun" or tracking missiles in numbers (or said machine gun in a very large turret wich can actually have proper shields) will have a lot of difficulty dealing with a group of small ships. But the poor AI mechanics (no way to get them back in the carrier and bad combat skills) and the lack of enough players to pilot all the fighters (and carrier respawn points) in most factions mean that those strategies can only be used effectively by using drones, and not bothering picking them up after the fight.

The community is divided between the one saying that a fighter killing a capital ship make no sense, and that small ships should be more useful, but mostly in numbers, and the ones who want small ships to have enough of a advantage over large ships for size to not make a difference, or even nerf large ships to the point that it is preferential to use small ones.
They also say that large ships take more effort to build and those players should be rewarded by a more effective ship (kinda true, but a large doomcube is really easy to set up with 10x10x10 block placement)
And of course the ones who said that it's just about getting the economy (and instant-spawn blueprint system (shema. shipyards. now.)) to be balanced so that getting a larger ship is actually more difficult than getting a small one, eventually leading to larger ships to be more rare and valuable for this reason, and fleets actually being made of ships of all sizes (that the faction can afford) instead of only capitals.
(can you see my biaised opinion through these paragraphs? if you don't, it's just down there)

I would personally say that a ship should not be able to get killed by a ship under half it's mass in a 1v1 engagement, but groups of small ships should have no trouble killing a large one (we've of couse talking about proper warships here. A poorly armed and shielded freighter could and should die to pirate fighters easily), or at least crippling it by killing turrets and engines to help the rest of their fleet. Economy should, as said before, balance the numbers of small and large ships in the game.

So to solve this, i introduce the undershield. basically, in addition to the main bubble shield, you have another shield on the surface of the blocks, like they are currently. This shield would have it's own HP bar, separate of the main shield HP. Taking one down leave the other one acrtive.

The main purpose of this shield is to prevent the ships going under the main shield to immediately start dealing damage. It would of course cover turrets too (and docked ships), unlike the current ones. The idea is that while small ships can get under there, this shield will make necessary to have enough firepower in there to do damage to the capital ship, in other words, smaller ships can avoid the main shields, but must be in sufficient numbers to actually cause damage to the capital ship.​

This leads to the wanted effect : a single small ship can't kill a capital ship, but a group of them can (or cripple it by killing turrets and subsystems so the rest of the fleet can kill it easily). And large ships can kill it too, but they need to take down the main shield first, like they do in the current game.

Of course this shield scale with the size of the main shields, so the bigger the ship and it's shields are, the more fighters and bombers you will need there, or, if the ship is large enough, you can get larger ships in there.

The undershield needs to be balanced, because if too weak, small ships have a huge advantage and if too strong, it will be like it currently is, with fighters not being able to get through the shields.

Now, we should be able to set (in the structure tab?) wich percentage of shields we dedicate to the inner shield and wich percentage goes to the main shield (eventually the percentage of capacity and the percentage of recharge, so we can have a strong main shield, and a quickly regenerating inner one). so we can choose how we want to balance the protection of the ship against large to small ships, maybe with a default 10% on the inner shield (number debatable). Now, players shouldn't be able ot just put it all in the inner shield, resulting in shields like they are now.

The idea i have is that instead of a hard cap on the percentage of shields allowed in the inner shields (would result in evry ship using this max percentage), but instead have the shields allocated to the inner shield either :

- Return significantly less shield regen/capacity than they would on the main shield, like 50% (number debatable). Will need a lot of balancing as it may lead to the inner shield to be too weak with too small numbers, requiring to divert more shields in it, and making it actually protect from fighters require to loose most of your main shields, or to be too powerful with too large numbers, making putting it all in there viable.
- Return a smaller and smaller percentage of the allocated shields as the inner shield percentage of allocated blocks gets bigger (better?), resulting in small inner shields using close to their full power (linear? : 90% for 10% shields allocated in and 95% for 5%, ... ? Find the math that's the most balanced. Open to suggestions.), but putting more and more shields in the inner shield lowering significantly your overall shields, so putting it all in the inner shield is not viable. The curve should start decreasing from the start, because if you can put a part of your shields in the inner shield without drawbacks up to some percentage, then putting less than it in would be just useless.​

Anyway, wichever way is choosen, the more shields you put in the undershield and the more protection you have against fighters ignoring the main shield, but the less global shielding you have, and the less protection against large ships you have.
(maybe buff the shields blocks so that the global shields (main+inner) have roughly the same value as they did before for the default percentage of shields allocated to the inner shield, or else ships getting updated will have losses of shields between before and after the update)
RP excuse : Bending the shields to get around the details of the ship is unstable, cauing part of the shielding field to escape and so cause significant losses in their power, or something like that.

So you can have a ship using it's shields to max power but not having any serious protection against fighters (would be useful for the fleet-covering shields ships i talked about before, and also fighters and other small ships wich don't have enough space to risk anything getting under anyway), or you can put it all in the inner shield resulting in great close protection but much less overall shields (bad idea, a capital ship will make short work of you).

Of course transfering shields from the outer to inner shields should not be possible in combat, so you can't adjust your protection against fighters or caps ships depending of fhat is in front of you on the fly. This can be done with a huge cooldown as a placeholder, but the best would be to allow it only when the ship is away of all ennemies, or even better, docked in a shipyard (wich could be required to modify paraeters of any ship system, though it could be annoying when you want to fix stuff on the field. But definitely the kind of stuf that would fit for the undershield ratio (debatable))

Spoiler

The inner shield does create a problem : A outer shield only system has the advantage there is no shields inside the ship, so bording parties (should be a thing, but currently it's kinda impossible to board a ship) can freely blow walls up. With the undershield, we have the same issue that we have with the current shields, wich is shields inside the ship, just that they will be significantly weaker. The best way to fix this would be to have the game know if a air block is on the inside or outside of the ship, preferrentially by introducing actual air blocks to fill it in, allowing to add proper life supports stuff in the game. But i'm getting off topic. We can also help boarding parties by introducing a handheld (and maybe a ship version for boarding ships?) tool (Plasma cutter? whatever wich cuts at short range and feels spacey) to destroy blocks from others factions (in a significant amount of time) while ignoring shields. (Could cause griefing issues, as it is quite easier to use it to steal a ship that by shooting it until the faction module gets destroyed)

Now we're left with a major issue : we don't want a large ship moving close to get the end of it's guns in the bubble and avoid the shields. This could be solved in different ways, like causing heavy damage to any ship placed partially on the shield border along said border if it stays there for too long (or only ships bigger in one of their box dimentions than the capital ship box to shield box distance, but it could lead to issues in carriers, unless we could turn the shields of the docked ship off (but would be tedious), see paragraph on turing shields off), or preventing a ship wich is partially on the shield border to fire weapons with their output situated inside the shields (more carrier friendly, the biggest issue would be to detect where the weapon output is relative to the shields and if the ship is partially in). Or anything else wich works (Open to sugestions).
(or we could just allow it, and it's to the pilot to be careful to not the ennemy get too close, and collsion damage would be enough for the pilot of the other ship to not try this maneuver)
Shields could protect against collision damage (Well, they protect against missiles and other kinetic damage), (In case you don't know, there is collision damage in the game, it is just highly experimental, and disabled by default on the config, but we can suppose it will be fully added once it will be done) wich would help a lot when docking stuff in carriers, as well as protect against ramming wich otherwise would be really powerful if it ignores shields, or just protect against collisions with asteroids or space debris. Collision damage with the main bubble shield would wok differently than with the ship. There would be of course a minimal speed to take damage on collision with the shield, could be the speed to get damage when colliding with a normal solid object, but i would prefer a signficantly higher one, as fighters and other small ships (boarding ships, disentegrator torpedoes, ...) need to be able to get under it without slowing down too much.

Stuff colliding with the bubble shield would take collision damage while the shield take the same amount of damage, and get slowed down, but not stopped. If the bubble shield goes down, it would stop having a collision box.

Stuff colliding with the hull would get damaged as it currently is, but the undershield, if active, would take either part of the damage and transfer the rest to the blocks, or full damage and protect the blocks (debatable). Since i suggest the main shield collision speed to be higher that the speed required to get damage when colliding with blocks, the undershield could use a similar system, leaving a range of speeds where the blocks will be damage without damage being absorbed by the shields, or we could have the damage absorption start at the block damage speed, but then it would not feel coherent with the other collision speed, but it coud be better for docking and gameplay in general. So it it debatable too.

Like with how it stops shots, the outer shield cause collision damage only when going in, not out.​

So this is all the most important stuff about the shields, now the random stuff :

We could have some kinds of weapons (punch-through/piercing? or something completely different.) wich would go through the shields (the bubble one, at least), losing a variable part of their damage (depending of the shield strenght relative to the weapon strenght). Could be a terrible idea though. Debatable.

Since we have 2 shields, shield transfer beams could either draw/output in the shield they're hitting or the 2 at the same time. Debatable.
The display blocks can be used to show how many shields you have, we could keep that for the total shielding (main+undershield) and add 2 separate text bits (how do you call those?) to display separately the main and inner shields.
Add a shield frame for hangars doors? Make a loop like with gates and you get a shield in, wich is either fully decorative, or has roughly the properties of the bubble shield (especially in term of collisions) and link it to shield gnerator and capacitor blocks to get it to work, has the shielding and regeneration provided by the linked blocks. Don't need a shield bar on the hud, but we could use display blocks to see the current shielding in. As the outer shield, we could give it a inner and outer side, so it stops stuff only one way. Should be toggleable on/off with logic.
We could have a way to turn shields off, to save power (Do they even use power, or is it only when they regenerate? Should be full time.), or do whatever you wnat to do with shields off (like ships in carriers.).
The shields could use a longer cooldown once they're down. at least 5 seconds on the smallest ships, up to a minute or so on the biggest. With the current system, they're back up as soon as you stop shooting. Once they're down it's no longer relevant to this topic, it's just about making armor useful (I wish you could go with armor as your primary defence system instead of having it only as a (terrible) backup if shields fail), systems explode when damaged enough and get rid of core drilling.
Link shields to a light (or any other way wich works) to get them take the colour you want. Most shields in sci-fi are blue, but there's still plenty of yellow ones.
The system should work on stations like on ships, not sure for the planets however, but we should find a way. Open to suggestions.

Edit : forgot this one :
We could use a "shield projector block" for planets and eventually some specific applications on ships and stations. You link it with shield generators and capacitors, and then set the bubble box dims (can use a min and max value system like the main shield, or just extenders like docks), and it create it's own shield bubble centered on itself, independent from any other shield you would have (like others bubbles) Possible uses include :

• With a bunch of those, you could setup a modular shielding system protecting each ship section individually. Could add a lot to ship design.
• Emerency shields for important areas (core room, bridge, AI core room if you have one, ...). Would not be OP, as it's not more shields to kill before reaching the area, since there's the same shield amount by shield blocks on the ship ratio, it's just in 2 separate shields to kill individually. Don't use more firepower, just looks cool and surprise the attacker.

​

Ok i think i'm done. I may add more to this as i remember all the stuff i wanted to write there (I've been writing and figuring stuff out for 5 hours now, kinda forgot the ideas i had at the beggining).

Ok, so i'm not saying I don't like the idea in fact I think bubble shields should be how shields work. In all the movies you've seen the shields are always a bubble so it makes sense to do that. Second I've never liked the idea of having your shield barrier on the ship. Third the shield should only protect you from weapon fire. Forth I agree with not needing shields on turrets. And thith why wouldn't you like bubble shields it looks allot cooler. The shield would be invisible until a projectile would hit it and it would make a really cool effect. This would also fix the problem of missiles killing you even though you have shields and there's a wall next to you. Over all i think bubble shields should be a thing.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Ok, so i'm not saying I don't like the idea in fact I think bubble shields should be how shields work. In all the movies you've seen the shields are always a bubble so it makes sense to do that. Second I've never liked the idea of having your shield barrier on the ship. Third the shield should only protect you from weapon fire. Forth I agree with not needing shields on turrets. And thith why wouldn't you like bubble shields it looks allot cooler. The shield would be invisible until a projectile would hit it and it would make a really cool effect. This would also fix the problem of missiles killing you even though you have shields and there's a wall next to you. Over all i think bubble shields should be a thing.

Bubble shields were in the game once. But they lagged to much to make pvp and pve viable, so it gor changed to the current shields.

 

[YellowMiner]

Bubble shields were in the game once. But they lagged to much to make pvp and pve viable, so it gor changed to the current shields.

Could you tell wich version of the game? I've been around for at least 2 years now and they were like they currently are since then. I'd like to know how those shields were. If they were complex shapes of course it would have lagged like hell. The game engine, the rendering engine and shema's skills have improved a lot since then. So i assume that if we keep the shape simple it could run nicely.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

I haven't been around for that long. But apparently in very early versions of the game they had bubble shields (I watched lots of really old members tell a lot of new players this). And they were complex shapes.

But to be honest, the current shields really aren't terrible. We just need a way to give turrets a percentage of the regen from the mothership and the interior of ships shouldn't have shields.

 

[bugy855]

I still think bubble shield's are the way to go.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

I still think bubble shield's are the way to go.

Only if you want lag. In its current state it really should not be a priority to reintroduce bubble shields to starmade. There are far more important things that need adding. The current shields work, loads of other things aren't finished yet, and if you gave anyone the choice between having creatures and bubble shields they would most likely go for creatures.