Dalas120 So, I've been thinking for a while about the idea of giving shields collision arcs. I think it would be more consistent (what's the difference between a big missile and small ship?), and could potentially lead to cool strategies like using shields to hold a fighter inside a larger ship. It would also weaken ramming, which I'm not sure is good or bad.
The main issue with this is that it's pretty hard to do, technically. Shields are pretty weird physics objects, both because of their shape (a partial circle perimeter) and the fact that they only detect collisions in one direction.
Dalas120 There's also a bug(?) where cannon bullets spawn at the end of the barrel, but the barrel itself has no collision. This allows ramming cannons to spawn bullets inside of enemy ships, potentially bypassing armor.
Less of a bug, more of a "something I never thought was a big deal". I'm against adding collision to barrels for performance reasons, but am open to other solutions. (Spawn bullet at base of barrel? Check to make sure spawn location isn't blocked before firing?)
Dalas120 That's roughly what I was thinking. I assume it would stick to ships instead of bouncing off?
So I just did a quick test of this, and it mostly works, except that the collision object has a tendency to roll off parts and shields that it doesn't kill, causing it to hit things that it otherwise wouldn't hit. I'm not sure how easy it will be to make it "stick" to the ship/shield without rolling off. (That's not a out-of-the-box feature of the physics engine.)