Vehicle Question

Is it possible to have a door on a vehicle that has more than one prim? I.e., the door has more than one prim, not the vehicle.

I'm assuming the Hinge functions don't actually work very well, as the wiki seems to indicate. The only way I can see to make a vehicle door is with llSetLocalRot or llSetPos for a sliding door, both of which only move the one prim.

Any way to move a door that's made of more than one prim?

thanks

Yes. By having a seperate script in each prim rotating/moving that prim in synch with the others. It's not always pretty, depending on conditions in the sim, but most of the time it works OK. llMessageLinked is your freind here for having them all work at the same time.

Thanks, Jillian. I was thinking of something like that but was afraid it would look too clunky. I will check it out and report back on my results.

I try to avoid having moving parts that have to move in synch with each other. It looks pretty weird when the pieces move/rotate at slightly different times.

if you are bent on having multiple prims then a sliding door is the better option. rotating is problematic since the centers of rotation are different.

According to Andrew, this should be addressed in 1.7, along with vehicles, as per an ingame conversation with him.

I'd have to concur with the general consensus. Rotating/moving multiple prims is nasty math and slightly lag makes the whole thing look excessively awkdward.

My doors all work by just deforming the primitive that it's made from. It gets smaller when you click on it, and then returns to normal size either after X amount of time, or when clicked on again. It doesn't work while physics are turned on for some reason, but that's why my really big vehicle with doors has an ignition button =P

No function that changes the mass of an object works while the object is physical.

Another option is to:

- actually delink the prims before rotating/moving them (use a list of linknumbers or check the llGetLinkName() and name all the door prims 'doorprim')

- relink them to eachother... with your rotation/move point as root prim.

- do your rotation. move etc.

- relink the door with the vehicle.

Do the same, but with reverse rot/move to close the door.

The object needs to be non physical during this operation though. Otherwise you'll either have your door fall off into pieces, or when moving, have it actually explode. (both fun)

Also it requires the owner to agree on delink/relink (permission requester) before you can actually do this.

A third problem is with the owner moving/taking etc. the vehicle while the door is in motion. As it will be left behind...


On a different note. It's possible to do non-axial rotations nowadays by doing a move and a rotate at the same time using one llSetPrimitiveParams(). The math is horrible though...

Thank you all for the feedback! I just made a 1-prim sliding door in the end and will wait around for the Hinge stuff or try some other solutions on a future project.

If you are interested, IM me in game and I can show you how I achieved this with a 2 prim car door (door prim and glass prim).

both prims rotate around the same point. They rotate around the lower front corner of the glass and the upper front corner of the door pannel... Had to use 2 prims as they are on different planes.

It works but it _does_ look a bit clunky sometimes (especialy on a laggy simm). Done the way I do it, there is no significant math work to figure out, just have to take some initial vector/roatation snapshots and plug in the numbers as needed.

I can't wait for the new physics angine to make these problems easier and cleaner to solve.

Racer P.