
Don't forget that ship sprites can be animated as well, and your implementation will need to account for all of that variability as well. A close study of how things collide, how existing hit effects are generated and placed, the performance cost of existing hit effects, and so on - all of this is necessary. Typically, when I went outside, I had to shield my eyes from the bright sunlight. This effect would then be rather small, colored in an appropriate manner lore-wise, and perhaps could be triggered in such a manner that it can be rotated to align with the ship's contour or some radial vector from the ships visual COM. One possibility I can think of would be to perhaps define a hit effect for ships the way one does for weapons.

For starters, in this issue all have been told it must not be a performance bottleneck, and it can't look tacky.

for unmanned drones the hull will include an integrated energy shield.
Endless sky shields up for free#

They're closed now, because no one volunteered their time to make it happen. If one peruses the issues/closed issue list, you'll note a lot of similar requests for shield indication.
