Now he can learn to fly with shields up, like grandma

This week we have a much smaller update for you, but I still think it’s quite spiffy. Until now only fighters had shields. This perhaps wasn’t strange, as WCIV didn’t have shield effects on capital ships in-game, but if you look at the FMV there were some lovely shield effects; particularly in the battle between the Vesuvius and the St Helens.

You can hide behind the shield of the St Helens

We’ve tried to create something similar, but not identical. The FMV has flat, circular ripples which can be carefully placed. We have no control over where the player fires and, if the player fired into a corner, it would clip into the geometry or extend past it (as seen in WCP). Instead we project an animated texture over the collision geometry for a shield impact.

A few bits and pieces got improved as a result of our focus on this. Firstly, support for merging images into flip books was completed which Defiance has long been asking for (and will be used heavily with explosions and other effects), which allowed us to animate the impact. Secondly collisions for lasers were improved to prevent them colliding with the turrets and hull in a single frame.

You gonna finish that?

A few issues regarding last weeks post have been brought up. Eagle-eyed fans noticed that the parked Hellcat was scaled down slightly to fit and, yes, the hangar lighting was a little too bright etc. It’s great getting feedback so please don’t stop; but in case anyone is worried that we will release like that, we want to reassure that everything we’re showing is in-progress and we have every intention of tweaking it all.