I don't recall in any of the series of ship have a "skin tight" shield. They have the bubble effect. I also do play with the shield graphic turned off.
Except, of course, the Enterprise-E in Nemesis, who had skin tight shields rather than bubble shields.
My god you RP'ers argue over the most minute things. Shields are fine the way they are right now, there are so many more important things in the game that need work.
You might as well be complaining about trees with the wrong orientation at SFA.
I disagree, despite having a decent system myself. The target audience for an MMO doesn't even necessarily have a dedicated graphics card and many play on a laptop or a 5+ year old computer. PC gamers are not the target. A lot of people have had issues with STO overheating their system or not meeting the specs.
The game is more than fine as it is and needs to utilize the features it has better, such as some mild hair physics and partial transparency on hair. It needs smarter eye candy, notmoreof it.
Compareit solely to MMOs, not PC games. The levelof eye candy is good;it just needs to utilize existing features better. (So, for example, renderingindividual hairs is silly. But having hair use some physics like the mirror sashes and a texture with partial transparencylike Caitian whiskers, totally doable.)
Indeed, very few people have a top of the line system, and unfortunately STO's graphics engine isnt the most efficient either which has even me with a Core i5-2500k at 4GHz, 8GB RAM and a GTX 470 to get some hefty performance drops here and there.
Bubble shields are the most identifiable shield type with the Star Trek franchise, and I rather that any more eye candy be focused on more interesting things such as improved ship damage modeling and particle effects.
I for one would rather see an enemy ship gloriously break apart in pieces and secondary explosions than having a skin tight shield.
Yes definitely, I want to see skintight shields on some ample nacelles. Where do I sign up?
Agreed. Skin tight shields have been in star trek longer than bubble shields and they should have an opton at least for us players to choose which shield. If the devs decide not to make an shield console.
Hate to burst your bubble.... *snicker*.... but skintight shields are virtually non-existant from the 24th century and onwards.
Bubble shield dominates, and as mentioned before, bubble shields are far far less of a performance drain than skintight shields would be.
Hate to burst your bubble.... *snicker*.... but skintight shields are virtually non-existant from the 24th century and onwards.
Bubble shield dominates, and as mentioned before, bubble shields are far far less of a performance drain than skintight shields would be.
Well hate to burst your bubble shield but skin tight shield have been used since the 23rd century and late 24th century.
Where is your source that the bubble shield is far far less of a performance drain. I admit there are advantages with the bubble shield over the skin tight but it is the same with the skin tight shields over the bubble shields.
Where is your source that the bubble shield is far far less of a performance drain. I admit there are advantages with the bubble shield over the skin tight but it is the same with the skin tight shields over the bubble shields.
:p:p
Umm i never said there were no skin tight shields in the 24th century, i said they were virtually non-existant, IE aside from Nemesis they have not appeared in 24th century based programs.
As for the performance drain, you clearly misunderstand me. I am talking about the performance drain skin tight shields would have on the game engine.
I.E double hull geometry plus shield VFX for every single ship would drasticly increase hardware requirements for the game.
In fact I can bet that skin tight shields will NEVER happen for that very reason.
Where is your source that the bubble shield is far far less of a performance drain. I admit there are advantages with the bubble shield over the skin tight but it is the same with the skin tight shields over the bubble shields.
:p:p
if anything, skintight shields would be a far less drain on power, as you'd require less surface area.
Like i said, I was talking about game engine performance, not Star Trek performance.
Well you should and need to be more clear on what you are saying, its not like i can ready your mind and AdmGillis I know that since i and alot of other people have mention the same thing, thank you for telling me something i already knew but please tell me something new not old.
Back on topic. I doubt it could be hard to make the skin tight shields on here, couldn't they just make the polaize hull effect look more like a shield its skin tight just need to mkae it look like a shield and there you have it.
Umm i never said there were no skin tight shields in the 24th century, i said they were virtually non-existant, IE aside from Nemesis they have not appeared in 24th century based programs.
As for the performance drain, you clearly misunderstand me. I am talking about the performance drain skin tight shields would have on the game engine.
I.E double hull geometry plus shield VFX for every single ship would drasticly increase hardware requirements for the game.
In fact I can bet that skin tight shields will NEVER happen for that very reason.
They wouldn't need double hull geometry at all, I imagine. Rather, they could simply apply a shader and/or glowmap onto the hull itself, triggered by receiving damage while shields are up. It's a common texture trick used by many, many games. STO uses something like it already to apply damaged textures to ships under certain hull HP percents.
I imagine it's still fairly difficult, though, as they'd have to remove all the existing bubble FX and rework how weapon graphics impact a ship with shields up.
The biggest problem with that right now is though that it becomes ultimately pointless, since whenever your ship comes under fire its pretty much lit up like a christmas tree.
Heck, sometimes I don't even see the normal shield bubbles for all the fireworks.
Agreed. Skin tight shields have been in star trek longer than bubble shields and they should have an opton at least for us players to choose which shield. If the devs decide not to make an shield console.
Longer?
By what standard, please?
We've seen them in two movies, that's it.
While all the rest that used actual shields (not counting instances where noone used shields like Star Trek 2&3 or "Enterprise) were bubbles
if anything, skintight shields would be a far less drain on power, as you'd require less surface area.
Actually not.
A sphere has the least surface compared to its volume.
When you consider all the elements that make up the surface of a starship the bubble (which at least comes close to a shere) is far more efficient.
Well anyway, I think it is something the devs could consider to add in the game, give players the choice of which shield shape to use or maybe make a console out of it?
It's possible the E was using the skin-tight shields due to the environment of the Bassen Rift which prevented extending shields much further at the time, but I got nothing to back that up at all.
Hm. Y'Know... I imagine this would be intensive to develop for ALL ships but maybe as a Sovereign-specific item, like a console?
There's even two versions of the Sovereign seen in the movies so a Sovereign refit, with both versions available at the tailor and a console that modifies how the shields work would be snazzy.
I mean, it was in Nemesis, where the Sovereign variant appeared anyway...
Actually not.
A sphere has the least surface compared to its volume.
When you consider all the elements that make up the surface of a starship the bubble (which at least comes close to a shere) is far more efficient.
Covering more volume exposes more surface area.
Shielding space that is not occupied by the physical object being shielded is nothing but a waste.
Shielding space that is not occupied by the physical object being shielded is nothing but a waste.
But it's a waste arguably made essential by virtue of the fact that nobody's warships in Star Trek are primarily designed for war in space. They're designed for stealth strikes and troop/colonist transport, not full on dogfighting.
Hence their space combat preparedness features like shields are designed to run from a single generator with stealth/mobility/speed/interior space as the dominant concerns.
Shielding space that is not occupied by the physical object being shielded is nothing but a waste.
If the shape of your volume is fairly complex, with lots of edges and angles, a smaller volume can require just as much surface or more than a larger volume with all those edges and angles. Compare surface of a cube to the surface of a sphere.
A sphere with radius r has a volume of 4/3 pi r^3 and a surface of 4 * pi r^2.
A cube with side length of a has a volume of a^3 and a surface of 6a^2.
Volume per Surface for sphere: 1/3 r
Volume per Surface for cube: 1/6 a
So for each point of surface I get more volume, or for each point of volume you get less surface.
The radius of a sphere perfectly including the entire cube is a SQRT(3)/2 * a.
Now imagine your ship is actually made from, say, 4 Cubes (1 Saucer, one engineering, 2 nacelles). This leaves you with more surface for those cubes, but you don't actually gain any volume. Now the volume per surface ratio for your multi-cube ship is even worse than before. I am too lazy to do the math for that, but it seems a simply optimization problem - at some point, it's just more efficient to accept covering "useless" volume with a sphere rather, as you still have to cover less surface if you try to cover only the actual volume "skintight".
I don't think they're talking about surface area in terms of the size of the shield but in terms of area that can be hit by an untargeted or poorly targeted projectile. For example, how with skintight shields, a torpedo or beam could pass between the neck and nacelle struts without hitting anything, whereas with a bubble, a beam could hit a point 10 yeards from the ship the ship and strike the shields.
Hm. Y'Know... I imagine this would be intensive to develop for ALL ships but maybe as a Sovereign-specific item, like a console?
There's even two versions of the Sovereign seen in the movies so a Sovereign refit, with both versions available at the tailor and a console that modifies how the shields work would be snazzy.
I mean, it was in Nemesis, where the Sovereign variant appeared anyway...
This would be cool and would make the sovereign class refit more unique if it had this console but since there are different types of shields in the game maybe instead of a console just have the sovereign refit have this ability so that no matter what shield type you use e.g. cov, regen, resilent etc they would still look like skin tight and maybe the consisuation refit should have this?
Comments
Except, of course, the Enterprise-E in Nemesis, who had skin tight shields rather than bubble shields.
Which of course wasn't a series.
...a series of blunders.:)
You might as well be complaining about trees with the wrong orientation at SFA.
And the Enterprise A in ST 6.
I disagree, despite having a decent system myself. The target audience for an MMO doesn't even necessarily have a dedicated graphics card and many play on a laptop or a 5+ year old computer. PC gamers are not the target. A lot of people have had issues with STO overheating their system or not meeting the specs.
The game is more than fine as it is and needs to utilize the features it has better, such as some mild hair physics and partial transparency on hair. It needs smarter eye candy, notmoreof it.
Compareit solely to MMOs, not PC games. The levelof eye candy is good;it just needs to utilize existing features better. (So, for example, renderingindividual hairs is silly. But having hair use some physics like the mirror sashes and a texture with partial transparencylike Caitian whiskers, totally doable.)
Bubble shields are the most identifiable shield type with the Star Trek franchise, and I rather that any more eye candy be focused on more interesting things such as improved ship damage modeling and particle effects.
I for one would rather see an enemy ship gloriously break apart in pieces and secondary explosions than having a skin tight shield.
Kinda sad when a decade old game has vastly superior damage effects.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPnDrKn0Z0Y
Agreed. Skin tight shields have been in star trek longer than bubble shields and they should have an opton at least for us players to choose which shield. If the devs decide not to make an shield console.
Bubble shield dominates, and as mentioned before, bubble shields are far far less of a performance drain than skintight shields would be.
Well hate to burst your bubble shield
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrc0Thr7FVc&feature=fvst
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv-Y_PKuXqo
Where is your source that the bubble shield is far far less of a performance drain. I admit there are advantages with the bubble shield over the skin tight but it is the same with the skin tight shields over the bubble shields.
Umm i never said there were no skin tight shields in the 24th century, i said they were virtually non-existant, IE aside from Nemesis they have not appeared in 24th century based programs.
As for the performance drain, you clearly misunderstand me. I am talking about the performance drain skin tight shields would have on the game engine.
I.E double hull geometry plus shield VFX for every single ship would drasticly increase hardware requirements for the game.
In fact I can bet that skin tight shields will NEVER happen for that very reason.
if anything, skintight shields would be a far less drain on power, as you'd require less surface area.
Like i said, I was talking about game engine performance, not Star Trek performance.
Well you should and need to be more clear on what you are saying, its not like i can ready your mind and AdmGillis I know that since i and alot of other people have mention the same thing, thank you for telling me something i already knew but please tell me something new not old.
Back on topic. I doubt it could be hard to make the skin tight shields on here, couldn't they just make the polaize hull effect look more like a shield its skin tight just need to mkae it look like a shield and there you have it.
They wouldn't need double hull geometry at all, I imagine. Rather, they could simply apply a shader and/or glowmap onto the hull itself, triggered by receiving damage while shields are up. It's a common texture trick used by many, many games. STO uses something like it already to apply damaged textures to ships under certain hull HP percents.
I imagine it's still fairly difficult, though, as they'd have to remove all the existing bubble FX and rework how weapon graphics impact a ship with shields up.
Heck, sometimes I don't even see the normal shield bubbles for all the fireworks.
Longer?
By what standard, please?
We've seen them in two movies, that's it.
While all the rest that used actual shields (not counting instances where noone used shields like Star Trek 2&3 or "Enterprise) were bubbles
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100611184736/memoryalpha/en/images/4/44/Magnetic_pulse_impacts_shields.jpg
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/tmp2/tmphd1343.jpg
http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/9/95/Borg_Shield_neutralizer.jpg
and that includes ships set in a time after Nemesis, like TNG:"All Good Things"
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KKtmE4MH4Fc/TaXRtffZHrI/AAAAAAAAApI/corcwdHrRF4/s1600/USS-Pasteur-NCC-58928.jpg
and VOV:"Endgame"
http://voy.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/7x25-26/endgame_0547.jpg
Actually not.
A sphere has the least surface compared to its volume.
When you consider all the elements that make up the surface of a starship the bubble (which at least comes close to a shere) is far more efficient.
Yes they have been since the beginning. But in the movies such as ST 6 and 10 you see skin tight shields used.
There's even two versions of the Sovereign seen in the movies so a Sovereign refit, with both versions available at the tailor and a console that modifies how the shields work would be snazzy.
I mean, it was in Nemesis, where the Sovereign variant appeared anyway...
Covering more volume exposes more surface area.
Shielding space that is not occupied by the physical object being shielded is nothing but a waste.
But it's a waste arguably made essential by virtue of the fact that nobody's warships in Star Trek are primarily designed for war in space. They're designed for stealth strikes and troop/colonist transport, not full on dogfighting.
Hence their space combat preparedness features like shields are designed to run from a single generator with stealth/mobility/speed/interior space as the dominant concerns.
If the shape of your volume is fairly complex, with lots of edges and angles, a smaller volume can require just as much surface or more than a larger volume with all those edges and angles. Compare surface of a cube to the surface of a sphere.
A sphere with radius r has a volume of 4/3 pi r^3 and a surface of 4 * pi r^2.
A cube with side length of a has a volume of a^3 and a surface of 6a^2.
Volume per Surface for sphere: 1/3 r
Volume per Surface for cube: 1/6 a
So for each point of surface I get more volume, or for each point of volume you get less surface.
The radius of a sphere perfectly including the entire cube is a SQRT(3)/2 * a.
Now imagine your ship is actually made from, say, 4 Cubes (1 Saucer, one engineering, 2 nacelles). This leaves you with more surface for those cubes, but you don't actually gain any volume. Now the volume per surface ratio for your multi-cube ship is even worse than before. I am too lazy to do the math for that, but it seems a simply optimization problem - at some point, it's just more efficient to accept covering "useless" volume with a sphere rather, as you still have to cover less surface if you try to cover only the actual volume "skintight".
This would be cool and would make the sovereign class refit more unique if it had this console but since there are different types of shields in the game maybe instead of a console just have the sovereign refit have this ability so that no matter what shield type you use e.g. cov, regen, resilent etc they would still look like skin tight and maybe the consisuation refit should have this?