Shields on the Matrix

Trying to figure out what the admin have been up to? Game related changes go here.

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Rain
Site Admin
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Joined: Sun Oct 03, 2010 6:18 pm

Shields on the Matrix

Post by Rain » Fri Apr 27, 2018 11:23 am

The HIC flowed towards her, a mass of jagged silvery arrowheads all twisting over themselves like a school of predatory fish. She raised up her avatar's hand and shot out a digital fireball that engulfed a number of the swarm. The constructs she hit de-rezzed in a satisfying spray of pixels, but the remainder scattered away from the Ice Killer and then dove down towards her. They slammed against her shield in a series of blinding flashes, delivering viral payloads to her systems that her shield software rapidly tried to process and nullify. Warnings about increasing CPU usage and heat levels flared at the side of her vision, her deck struggling to keep up with the onslaught. Dimly, back in her meat, she could feel the cyberdeck in her lap growing uncomfortably hot to the touch...

I've changed the way in which shields work in the Matrix.

Previously, they were pretty simple affairs; you ran the software and received an amount of shielding. Attacks against you lowered that shielding. If you had 0 shielding, whatever got run on you would do whatever nasty thing it was intended to do.

Now, your shield does not decrease when you get hit. Instead, your CPU heat level increases, representing the work that the shield software is doing to decode and nullify the incoming attacks. If your CPU heat reaches a critical level (100 degrees) your shield software will crash, leaving you defenseless. You'll get a warning at 90 degrees.

It's worth noting that your shields still protect you in exactly the same way that they did before (i.e. they'll take the same number of hits before getting destroyed). The shield rating affects how much heat you get per hit, the higher the rating the less heat you'll see.

The main difference to take away from this is that your heat will dissipate over time, meaning you can't halt and run your shield program to get back to full strength.

Please report any issues you encounter with this. If it breaks severely it'll automatically revert to the old system and send me an insulting message.

Harlander
Solo
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Joined: Mon Oct 20, 2008 7:15 pm

Re: Shields on the Matrix

Post by Harlander » Sun May 06, 2018 2:07 am

Looks like the message you get when starting a shield soft still talks about the "shield rating"...

Rain
Site Admin
Posts: 1040
Joined: Sun Oct 03, 2010 6:18 pm

Re: Shields on the Matrix

Post by Rain » Sun May 06, 2018 3:39 am

That's intentional. Otherwise you wouldn't know how good different shield softs are!

I'll make it output your heat level too.

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