[kodiak7251]

for some reason I cannot get any shields to work

I check the box  and when i run the game or reload fred the check has gone away.

no shields show up in the game at all

[den5]

There are no shields for B5 ships.

[Hellsevil22]

Don't 3rd Space ships have shields though?

[emi_100]

Don't 3rd Space ships have shields though?

Yes, it have.

[Peter12345]

The Vorlon ships also had shields.  Whenever a Vorlon ship charges up its main beam weapon, the energy charge also projects a shield barrier towards the front of that ship.  The shield of the large Vorlon Dreadnoughts can even fully repel Shadow beams. 
This was seen in the episode when the Vorlons first entered the war by decimating the shadow fleet that was attacking the Brakiri.  This resulted in Mr Morden's associates killing off the first Kosh.

[Vidmaster]

and in other episodes, (Into the Fire) they lack shields. The ship design is fine as it is, not to mention that these vessels are super poweful already.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

And the big one FS2 doesn't support cap ship shield effects yet.

[den5]

Because they don't have shield model? Or what? I remember there was a shielded Lucifier and his shield effects worked.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I believe that is surface shields which is a totally different monster. 

[Vidmaster]

We WC people got it to work properly but it still looks strange sometimes.

[Dragon]

Capship shields worked since retail (check Shivan Planet Killer from Inferno and Diablo from ITDOH, I'm also using cap shields without problmes), but they always looked a bit strange due to usual resolution of shield hit effects. Also, something (maybe -tbp flag in launcher) seems to completely disable shields in TBP.
You may consider adding shields to TS ships, but VE Dreadnought is already though enough (you can see in FH3).

[Mav]

Yeah, capship shields always worked... they're just a bit... tough to handle .

As far as I know, you have to take care that the shieldmesh isn't too far away from the hull - but in meters, not in percentages. Not really sure how close exactly they need to be, but in case of doubt it's better too close than too far
 (they may actually even be INSIDE the hull, though the exposed part of the hull then propably isn't protected - but that's still better then a bug, and you can still use surface shields to conceal such a glitch).
I think someone once mentioned the bounding box of the hull somehow being related to that, but I don't know if it's right.


As for mods with capship shields, there already were:
- Deimos with shielded turrets (still on FSMods)
- SSD Diablo
- SPD Vionashaak
- a pack from the Inferno team with all retail FS2-ships having a shieldmesh added (I still use their Lucy, just with FS1 textures and Lightspeeds glowmaps)
- a Kilrathi cruiser I shielded for WCS when I was still part of that team
- the SC Rictus at FSMods also seems to have a shieldmesh that should work, but I haven't tested that one in practise yet
- and propably some others...


So, they CAN be done. Just DON'T import a fighter shieldmesh and scale it up, as THAT would then really be bound to fail.

Do a nice individual shieldmesh for your ship, and you're mostly set.
Granted, those shields aren't 100% leakproof, but then I heard that fighter shields are neither - if you want to make sure nothing get directly through, use the "surface shields"-flag IN ADDITION to a custom shieldmesh.



There admittedly remains one issue:
To make your custom shieldmesh look good ingame, it needs to be smoothly curved, and at best it's polygons should also be roughly of equal size.


All this is from memory, I admittedly haven't done much along the lines of shieldmeshs during the last years... (WCS handed me a Terran corvette or something like that at the end, but it had a lot of nasty angles, and I propably also set my margins for "close" and "rounded" somewhat too high, so progress was slow as a snail - I think it's shielded to about 2/3 by now, but I haven't tested it ingame yet)




Thanks for listening, and sorry if I should have gotten a bit too loud maybe; but that whole myth about "capship shields wouldn't be possible" totally unnerves me, as I've now heard it the umpteenth time...

Else than that, happy modding (WITH capship shields), and please help spread the facts to improve the community and it's works, thanks .

[Dragon]

Importing shields and rescaling from smaler craft is a perfectly valid option, though I didn't used fighters, but cruiser sized ships from Omniscapper's Star Trek mod as a source.
I managed to have a perfectly working shiled on 3Km long Warcruiser (reskinned HTL Raynor) using this method.
Unfortunately you have to use Modelview to do this, which makes ships like Steve'o's Hyperion or Esarai's Amaterasu impossible to shield unless you have acces to modelling program.
I hope that shield manipulation will be introduced to PCS2 someday.

Also,

- a pack from the Inferno team with all retail FS2-ships having a shieldmesh added (I still use their Lucy, just with FS1 textures and Lightspeeds glowmaps)

That sounds interesting, where can I get it?

[Sushi]

Yeah, I had a shielded Arcadia once, back in Retail days. I built it into a mission where the player needed to fly a fighter under the shields and disarm it. Quite fun, but unfortunately lost to the mists of time.

[Mav]

Importing shields and rescaling from smaler craft is a perfectly valid option, though I didn't used fighters, but cruiser sized ships from Omniscapper's Star Trek mod as a source.
I managed to have a perfectly working shiled on 3Km long Warcruiser (reskinned HTL Raynor) using this method.

I haven't tried everything, admittedly... - maybe if the fighter shield fits your capship well enough it'll work, as well as if you rescale it more to the lower size (compared to your model).

Problems usually appeared for me when there was a really big blob of void within the shieldmesh...

Also, as I stated, Goober (or Bobboau?) once said that there was some relationship to the bounding box of the model... Aardwolf recently repeated this statement in the chat, so propably that's the main point - that your shieldmesh stays completely inside that box.

In the post above I was just posting the impressions I got by working along trial and error.

Unfortunately you have to use Modelview to do this, which makes ships like Steve'o's Hyperion or Esarai's Amaterasu impossible to shield unless you have acces to modelling program.
I hope that shield manipulation will be introduced to PCS2 someday.

Well, there was a high-poly version of modelview once... I'm still working with it, but am not sure where you could currently get it...
It works well with most high-poly models, though I couldn't load one or two extremely high ones (TSJ Amaterasu, as far as I remember - now THAT'S a ship... ) .

Also,

- a pack from the Inferno team with all retail FS2-ships having a shieldmesh added (I still use their Lucy, just with FS1 textures and Lightspeeds glowmaps)

That sounds interesting, where can I get it?

It originally was available on the oooold inferno-site.

I wanted to re-upload it to FSMods a few years ago and already had gotten permission by Woomeister to do so, but somehow didn't get to it and then got hardware-troubles for a long while .

Don't worry though, it's certainly on one of my backups.
Once I'll get to dig a bit through them, and once uploading is again enabled on FSMods, I'll upload it (that is, if nobody else has done it by then) .
Searching through these backups WILL take some time, though - sorry .

[Dragon]

Unfortunately you have to use Modelview to do this, which makes ships like Steve'o's Hyperion or Esarai's Amaterasu impossible to shield unless you have acces to modelling program.
I hope that shield manipulation will be introduced to PCS2 someday.

Well, there was a high-poly version of modelview once... I'm still working with it, but am not sure where you could currently get it...
It works well with most high-poly models, though I couldn't load one or two extremely high ones (TSJ Amaterasu, as far as I remember - now THAT'S a ship... ) .

That's how I got Stratcomm's ships shielded, unfortunately, when looking at the polycount, the new Steve'o's Hyperion falls under the same category as Amatersu.
So do other Steve'o's ships, maybe except the Sanctus.

[Mav]

Unfortunately you have to use Modelview to do this, which makes ships like Steve'o's Hyperion or Esarai's Amaterasu impossible to shield unless you have acces to modelling program.
I hope that shield manipulation will be introduced to PCS2 someday.

Well, there was a high-poly version of modelview once... I'm still working with it, but am not sure where you could currently get it...
It works well with most high-poly models, though I couldn't load one or two extremely high ones (TSJ Amaterasu, as far as I remember - now THAT'S a ship... ) .

That's how I got Stratcomm's ships shielded, unfortunately, when looking at the polycount, the new Steve'o's Hyperion falls under the same category as Amatersu.
So do other Steve'o's ships, maybe except the Sanctus.

*ugh*


... and those are going to be in BP, then?   Somehow I feel the URGENT need to get a new PC, suddenly...



....hmm. Wait. Wasn't Hyperion that 3-beamed thing?? Does look nice, but it really doesn't feel GTVA-like to me...

[The E]

Steve-O's Hyperion is commonly known as the Karuna in Blue Planet.