Shield Flare

[knowknowledge]

When a player is hit but not destroyed, their shields should light up in classic science fiction style.

Option 1:

0.6.0 did shield flares by taking the image of the ship to be flared, transforming it into a 1-bit image, then "fattening" that image by making 3 or 4 passes over it and applying the basic rule to the bitmap "if one of my 8 neighboring pixels is on, turn me on too", and then, with that fattened 1-bit ship image, it would use that as a mask and draw random TV static on top of the ship image. Combine that with a sinusoidal transparency (flare up and down) and you have yourselves a very fast, very slick shield flare that will even work in software rendering mode on a 500 MHz machine.

Option 2:

Use OpenGL for god's sake! One of the reasons we're suffering through learning OpenGL is to use it for eye candy effects exactly like this one. Think about creating the top half of an elliptical egg shape and applying a sort of Star Trek / TV-static texture to it, again with fading alpha values.