shield_dome

An energy-shield dome: a glowing hexagonal lattice over a hemisphere that ripples, dents and flares where shots land, crackles with arcs along its base, and flickers toward magenta-white as it is overloaded. Hits arrive as twelve float4 material properties, and everything (hex lattice, ripples, flares, strain flicker, base arcs) is evaluated per pixel each frame.

The vertex stage moves each vertex along its direction from the centre: a dent of up to 0.16 times the hit's strength at the impact, decaying quickly, and a smaller swell that travels outward across the dome as the hit ages. The fragment stage projects the direction from the dome's centre onto a plane through p.xz / (1 + p.y), a conformal projection that keeps the hex cells hexagonal, at hex_scale cells per unit. On that lattice it draws:

• a faint cell fill that pulses per cell, and lattice edges brightened by a slow scan that drifts up the dome and by heat;
• a fresnel rim;
• for each live hit, a fine shock ring and a wave quantised to whole hex cells, both expanding outward with age, a bright bloom at the impact, and a lingering heat patch;
• cells that strobe at 16 steps a second as heat rises;
• jagged arcs hugging the ground and short bolts rising off it, gated more open by heat;
• a whole-shield stutter at 27 steps a second and a shift toward magenta-white under strain.

Back faces draw at 0.55 brightness. The alpha is 1; the material blends it additively.

The shield_dome_mat material (additive, culling off, depth writes off, hex_scale 12) uses it on the shield_dome_mesh hemisphere in the fx_shield scene. The ShieldFx module, run by the ShieldFxDriver component, sets center once at start and writes the twelve hits and the strain every frame; ground_arcs reads the same table on the ground around it.

Properties