[Help] Help With Shields

[Dan1025]

I'm looking for a way to code the shield animation so that the .sod file displays the colour of the texture file being used, rather than the status/level of the shields ingame.

I know Elrond did this with his Blue Shields mod, and I've looked through those files, but my knowledge & understanding of animation coding is very limited. I'm just trying to set it for the specific texture file I'm using (for the stock 'Xshldx01.sod' file).

As always, any help would be appreciated

 

[CABAL]

You have to use sprites; the mesh will always be recolored to match shield health.

 

[Dan1025]

Yeah I get that, what I need is help writing the sprite entries themselves.

 

[USS_Excalibur]

You have to use sprites; the mesh will always be recolored to match shield health.

Only if the sheild texture is grayscale.

 

[Dan1025]

The shield is coloured not greyscale.

Anyone know how to do this?

 

[CABAL]

Only if the sheild texture is grayscale.

Could you show us an example. I thought I had tried that before.

Yeah I get that, what I need is help writing the sprite entries themselves.

Sorry, I misunderstood the question. Do you mean the entries in the SPR files or in the model hierarchy?

 

[Dan1025]

Sorry, I misunderstood the question. Do you mean the entries in the SPR files or in the model hierarchy?

Both would be really helpful, the animation needs to be the same as the stock sod though since that's what the texture was made for.

Is there any way to rewrite the existing sprite entries for the stock shield sod (I think they're in the 'tex_anim.spr' file), so that the animation & hardpoint entries are the same, but the colour uses the texture colour instead of the shield status?

 

[thunderfoot]

I think looking at what FahreS and CABAL have done with shields may be very helpful. I also think looking into Elrond's Blue Shields Mod may give you some good examples as well.

 

[CABAL]

On the hierarchy, I set up the tree as:

h_root
|------------------\
| |
h_geometry h_sprites
| |
g_mesh s_bshield_01


Then I added the following to the lights.spr file:

@reference=128
@tmaterial=additive
BlueShield1 bshield1 0 0 128 128

@sprite_node bshield BlueShield1 const (3,3) (0.3,0.3,0.3) billboard

I also had a texture labeled bshield1.tga with a single frame in color for the sprite and the mesh for the shield had a blank texture. It got me a non-animated shield effect that didn't fade from green to red. This is almost exactly what's in my shield mod, but it used more sprites. If you're only using one sprite, you probably shouldn't use the billboard tag on that last line, though.