Attempt on improving shield visuals

[Suslik]

It haunts me since time of Baldur's Gate 2 - obsessive mania for spherical defensive fields. I love the fact that tome uses a lot of them but I did not like the way they are visualized very much so I decided to make my own version of shield shader.

All right, I hope everyone remembers the shield as it is in 1.0.4:


I've thought the visualization is not physically correct - the image does not correspond to any physical effect. So I decided to simulate physically correct effect of thin spherical layer ray absorption, which is basically a raytracing algorithm but very efficient(it works with roughly the same speed as the previous visualization algorithm):


But I thought that the default texture was too noizy and decided to make a few my own textures for this shader. And now I want you(yes, you!) to decide which are ok, which are bad and which I should dump forever. Our candidates:

shield3.png:


shield4.png:


shield5.png:


shield6.png:


shield7.png:


Of course in dynamics they look better but I really count on your help guys to decide which ones to leave and which to use.

Effect shader:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/256 ... hield.frag

Effect textures:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/256 ... hield3.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/256 ... hield4.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/256 ... hield5.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/256 ... hield6.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/256 ... hield7.png

[Sianist]

i like the last one the best ......

[darkgod]

Video results !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHyv2VDH ... e=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qac8pe-h ... e=youtu.be

[Un67]

I agree, version 7 is definitely the best looking. Shame I will never see any of these, though, with my terrible laptop

[Sianist]

looking nice those implementations DarkGod ... the Time Shield do look a bit too cloudy / dense making it somewhat hard to actually view the character underneath it.

[CaptainTrips]

Ha! Wobble shields take roguelikes to a new level. Kudos!

[Oralordos]

I love how the mindslayer shields get more solid when supercharged.

[Doctornull]

Wow, cool stuff.

How about some NON-sphere shields? Like, just "belts" (for e.g. Displacement Shield) or a "cloud of electrons" looking thing.

Rings at different heights could indicate various things. A high-ish ring might look like a halo or a crown of fire.

[Suslik]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'm also working on a few other shader effects including procedural fire, check it out:



And sorry DG, I'm going to countryhouse again which means troubles with internet connection. So you probably won't see any updates till friday but I'll continue developing things and will tell you results later.