Four units in SplinterFaction project an area cloak: the two cloaking towers, the cloaking metal extractor, and the Federation's Deleter. Anything inside the field is hidden from the enemy until they get close. It is a strong effect with real tactical weight, and the way it was drawn undersold it badly.

The problem with a blue sphere

The old cloak field came from the Complete Annihilation era: a sphere with banded transparency, lit by fixed-function OpenGL, with three axis lines through the middle and a slow spin so you could tell it was there. It was blue. It glowed. It was, in every visual respect, a shield.

That is a readability problem before it is an aesthetic one. A shield says things inside here are protected. A cloak field says things inside here are hidden. Those are opposite promises, and a player who glances at a glowing blue dome should not have to remember which unit is standing under it to know which one they are looking at. With the real shields now looking like real shields, the resemblance was only going to get more confusing.

What concealment looks like now

A veil, not a glow. The field is a dim, slightly desaturated dome that darkens what is behind it. Two layers of slow-moving noise drift across its surface, so it looks like something hanging in the air rather than a solid object. The edge is barely there. From the usual camera height it reads as a patch of the map that has gone a little dark and a little uncertain, which is the correct message.

A ring on the ground. Where the dome meets the terrain, a soft ring marks the boundary. This is the part that matters for play: it tells you exactly how far the field reaches, so you can see which units are covered and which are standing a few elmos too far out. On the Deleter, which moves, the ring moves with it.

It breathes. Switching a field on blooms it out from the center; switching it off collapses it. The old one snapped between sizes.

The air bends. Each field also carries a faint refraction at its edge, through the same distortion system the shields and explosions use. It is subtle, and meant to be: a cloak field should be easy to miss if you are not looking for it, and hard to misread if you are.

As before, only the field's owner and their allies see it. The enemy sees nothing, which is the point.

Under the hood

The cloak field is now a third kind of instance in the same GL4 widget that draws the shields. It shares the sphere mesh, the instanced draw call and the depth-buffer intersection trick that gives the shields their contact glow; here that glow is tuned down and desaturated into the ground ring. The fragment shader branches on the instance kind, so a cloak field costs the same as a shield to draw and adds nothing to the frame when there are none on screen.

The gameplay side did not change. The cloak shield gadget still decides who is cloaked, still handles energy upkeep and decloak distance, still draws the minimap circle. It just sends its radius updates to the widget instead of drawing a sphere itself. If the widget is disabled, the old display-list sphere is still there as a fallback, so nothing disappears.

The veil's darkness, the ring's brightness, the noise scale and speed, and the strength of the edge refraction are each a single named value and can be adjusted live. A per-unit tint can be set in the unit's customparams if a particular cloaker wants its own color.