thanks for your very detailed feedback. This is quite helpful.
@Sleeper Service
I now understand what you mean. Yes, the vanilla hexagon shield gives the impression of a crossection (just like the ship is also shown as a crossection) while my shield is a three-dimensional sphere and due to that one might perceive the ship below, above - or as intended - in the center of the shield sphere. I don't think there is a good way to 'fix' it. I would encourage everyone to just try it out and you'll see if you do happen to get this perception that the shield sphere feels wrong.
One more comment about the size of the shield spheres and the overlap with the ship: There are some issues with that in vanilla, too. I had never noticed it until I started working on this mod but some ships touch the outer edge of the shield or even extend beyond that (the top right edge of the Crystal cruiser is outside the shield)
@Rockman from Russia
Unfortunately there isn't really a good way around this and when I look at the vanilla images again they have the same problem, only problem is they look "flat" as well. Of course, both of those things were really not things I notice too much while actually playing the game. It also affects the ship more when there are more active shield bubbles, you don't really notice it when you have a more transparent shield
Yes
I think the middle "transparent" part of the image just needs to be a "tad bit" wider...
I tried to make the transparent middle part about as wide as the original but I agree that a wider middle might help with the perception issue. I will try that out.
Enemy shields appear to be hardcoded, the game just resizes the bubble depending on the room layout of the ship.
That is correct. There is a simple graphic of a shield (without hexagon or any other pattern) that is re-sized automatically by the program to match the enemy ship size.
I actually like the original more after seeing those, they seem sort of "low res" with the thicker lines,and the smaller triangles one seems "cluttered".
Yes, I had tried out these other versions before and I think I will keep my original triangle and line size.
After playing with Better Planet's and Backgrounds, which has brighter backgrounds, I noticed I couldn't see the lines at all
Yes, that may be but I will not consider that. The backgrounds in that mod might look spectacular but many of them are far brighter and more busy than those in vanilla FTL. They not only interfere with the shield graphic of the ship but also the other UI elements (systems, weapons, subsystems) and make them hard to read.
Looking at the shield images in GIMP, I could tell they would not be the same in game as the vanilla ones because they are just darker. So I took the time to tweak with the images a bit and here is an image of what I came up with.
You are right, they were slightly darker. Personally I think hardly anyone would notice (apart from you apparently , also because the shields in the game have different opacities anyway, depending on how many shields you have.
Anyway, I will change this in the next version to get it closer to the original.
And also if you want to make a version that uses the vanilla hexes that is just more "high-res" and "slightly" more spherical looking that would be cool to see as well.
Funny that you mention it. Just before you posted it I had the same idea. I will do that and offer a 'high-res classic' version with hexagons besides my 'high res 3D' version.