Moving an avatar relative to an attachment??

I think this is probably impossible, but I thought I would check.

A friend and I have just putting the finishing touches to a rather fun broomstick vehicle, where, when you start it up, it rather gets away from you at first, dragging you behind it laying face down and clinging onto the tail, then you manage to scramble up on it, and, after a bit of struggle, stand upright, surfing gracefully along.

This works fine, and my friend, who knows all about animating and very little about scripting, wondered if we could turn into an attachment that becomes visible and does its tricks when you start flying.

My immediate reaction was it's probably impossible and, if it isn't, I've no idea how to do it, since the animation moves the avatar through 90 degrees from upright to face down, and then back up again, while the broomstick remains level.

It's easy with the avatar sitting on the vehicle, of course, because then the avatar is, effectively a child prim, and I can see how to move the broomstick around while it's attached to an avatar whose rotation doesn't change, but is there any way to rotate the broomstick so as to compensate for what the animation's doing to the avatar, so that it looks as if the avatar's moving relative to the broomstick?

Part of my problem is that I'm really not sure what's happening client-side and what's happening server-side, and trying to get a script to compensate for a client-side effect seems like it shouldn't be possible (or, at least, even if it is theoretically possible, to be so unpredictable as not to be worth the effort).

Erm, have you tried it to see what actually happens? Sorry I can't be more helpful but as I understand it the animation may make it 'look' as if the avatar is rotated 90 degrees but that's just appearance - as far as SL is concerned it stays in exactly the same place. So I don't think you'll have as much trouble as you're expecting.

she said it works as something you sit on. but if you attach it, it will basically move with your movements, so you would need to try to move it by itself to try to sync with the animation, but it would probably be way more trouble than it's worth

Thanks, both. I guess it is going to be way more trouble than it's worth, particularly since I really am not sure what I should be doing to compensate for attachments' apparent movement in relation to the apparent movement of my avatar.

I take Indeterminate's point about stuff not moving as far as the sim's concerned, but that only adds to my confusion, since clearly, while neither my avatar nor my attachments actually move during the course of an animation, equally clearly, attachments seem to move in perfect synchronization with her, otherwise it would look very odd indeed, with my avatar moving and her hair and shoes staying put. So trying to figure out what I should actually be moving on the sim, by script, to compensate for apparent client-side movements just gives me a headache!

I have tried some experiments and nothing ever ends up quite where I want it to -- if I get it right at one stage of the exercise, that seems to knock something out at an another. I'm sure it's possible, if only I had an adequate grasp of what I should be offsetting by what, and by how much, but I suspect it's one of those things -- like 20-prim linked doors -- that are so much effort to do, and never look right because there are so many things (e.g. sim performance at a given moment) I can't predict, that it's just not worth it.