Alternative way to create a shrinking zone

[gopostal]

In this mod I'm working on I create a collapsing zone to force the players to come together. The game selects a random playerstart to be the zone center. It then finds the most distant playerstart from itself and converts that distance to drawscale and spawns a sphere that encompasses all of the play area. This sphere begins to slowly shrink and to go outside of it hurts you.

I cannot get the zone to work visually no matter what I try. It works just fine if you are facing the zone center but as soon as the center moves out of your line of sight (even behind BSP) it flickers off. I've rendered it in the HUD, forced replication, forced the location to the player via prepivot, everything. I just give up, I don't think it's possible. If it is then it's above my pay grade. I've thrown probably 30 hours at this problem.

My question to you guys is how could I simulate this another way. Would it create a ton of overhead to spawn a spherical web net of actors that shrink inwards to display the zone edge? How else can I portray to the players where the zone edge would be?

This is an early version but you'll get the idea:


Think of a winding DM map and that this zone will work it's way through the rooms of that map so it's going to need somewhat of an eloquent solution.

Please help...I have SO much work in this mod and without this effect it's nothing new.

Update: effect is fixed thanks to FeraliDragon. I didn't think it was possible but he found a really good solution. After the contest either he or I will be making a full write-up on how it works because it's incredibly useful to bypass the flickering meshes problem when you can't see the origin.