Making a pet follow you on the ground

Hi,

Wondering if someone has good ideas for doing this. I'm trying to make a pet that'll follow me around on the ground even if I'm flying. Like any normal non-winged pet would

llMoveToTarget with my position makes it fly up to me. Setting hover height or buoyancy don't make any difference, I'm guessing the force applied by MoveToTarget is too strong. The Wiki does say that the force will persist until you stop moving to target or set tau to 0. Setting a strong downward force makes the object bounce around and looks pretty bad.

llMoveToTarget where the target is the ground under me (i.e. set target.z = llGround at my position) works OK if the ground is flat. But throw in a hill between me and the pet, and the pet tries to go through the hill (at least that's what I think is happening), and the pet gets stuck there.

My solution for now is to set incremental targets, and recalculate movement vectors each time, adjusting for ground. This way, if my incremental movement is small enough, it manages to navigate hills. I'm assuming that if the hill were sharp enough it wouldn't be able to climb it, but that's OK, a real pet wouldn't either. This actually works fairly well. The only thing I don't like is that it's pretty compute-heavy, with vector math and MoveToTarget calls being performed frequently.

Is there a better way to do this that I'm missing? Some combination of settings that would allow me to set one movement target and have the object navigate ground level changes on its own? What if I made it a vehicle and controlled the motors instead of setting movement/rotation targets - would that take care of this?

Thanks,
Kala

Try what I'm doing in my own pets' scripts, maybe ? You can look into the code, grab a chocobo egg at either of my stores and take it apart. Basically, they use vehicle motor parameters to move towards the owner, like you suggested.

Or if this is too complicated (and my scripts tend to rely on obscure global variables for everything, so it's probably the case) for you try changing the target of llMoveToTarget, by changing the .z part of the vector into whatever the ground height is at this position.

Example:

	sensor(integer c)
	{
		vector dest = llDetectedPos(0);
		vector offset = dest - llGetPos();
		integer steps = llCeil(llVecMag(offset) / 4.0);
		integer n;
		vector inctarget;
		vector incoffset = offset / steps;
		// using 4 meters between each incremental target, tweak to suit your needs

		llRotLookAt(llAxes2Rot(offset, <0,0,1> % offset, <0,0,1>), llGetMass(), 0.2);

		for(n=0; n<steps; ++n)
		{
			inctarget = llGetPos();
		
			inctarget.z = 0.75 * (inctarget.z - llGround(ZERO_VECTOR)) + llGround(offset);
			inctarget += incoffset;
			// this sets the z value to the ground height at dest + the "hover height" of your pet
			// minus one quarter of this "hover height" so that it does not start flying all the time

			llMoveToTarget(inctarget, 0.3);
			llSleep(0.275);
		}
		llStopMoveToTarget();
		llStopLookAt();
	}

Thanks. That's kinda what I'm doing (posted the original question under my wife's login again). The one big problem I see with that is that the pet won't work indoors, or the top floor/roof of a building, or anywhere else where I'm standing on a surface that's above ground level.

If I make it a vehicle will it take care of that issue? Or does the vehicle's hover/buoyancy also only work relative to ground/water?

Yes, using vehicle code will solve it instantly, almost hassle-free. Just reuse the code posted here, and replace the calls to llMoveToTarget with llSetVehicleVectorParam setting the engine to move forward instead.

Thanks. I'll try that out.