Lay down in a vehicle, How?

I'm looking through the Wiki right now on creating a poseball, for the animation code, and it's not going all that great .
I have a plane that I want a custom sitting animation instead of that 'straight-back chair' look. How do I get it to use my new animation and do I have to ask permissions (something I haven't worked with yet) ?

- Jolan

You'd animate the avatar using either the vehicle script or the pilot chair script (if seperate), a good example can be found in any freebie motorcycle, you take permissions PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION and add llstartanimation("your_anim_here" and llstopanimation as located in the example script your using.

I just got done working through the whole custom sitting animation thing for a project I'm working on, maybe a summary from the perspective of "the new guy who just figured it out" would be helpful.

First you need to give the prim a sit target, in state_entry or possibly in on_rez depending on your needs:

llSitTarget(<0.0,0.0,0.01>,ZERO_ROTATION);

The way you detect someone sitting in the seat is with the changed event, looking for a change of type CHANGED_LINK which is triggered by linking, unlinking, sitting or unsitting:

// if there was a change
changed(integer change)
    {
// if that change involved sitting (or linking)
        if (change & CHANGED_LINK)
        {
// if the avatar is present, meaning he sat down as opposed to standing up
            if (llAvatarOnSitTarget() != NULL_KEY)
            {
// request permission to animate
                llRequestPermissions(llAvatarOnSitTarget(), PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION);
            }
        }
    }

When permission is granted (happens transparently, clicking "sit" automatically implies permission to be animated) the run_time_permissions event is fired:

run_time_permissions(integer perm)
    {
// see if you got the permission you requested
        if (perm & PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION)
        {
// do the animation
            llStartAnimation(MyCustomAnimation);
        }
        else
        {
// insert debugging stuff here in case permissions didn't get granted for some reason
        }
    }

Hope some of that helps.

edit: slight correction

/ if there was a change 
changed(integer change) 
	{ 
// if that change involved sitting (or linking) 
		if (change & CHANGED_LINK) 
		{ 
// if the avatar is present, meaning he sat down as opposed to standing up 
			if (llAvatarOnSitTarget() != NULL_KEY) 
			{ 
// request permission to animate 
				llRequestPermissions(llAvatarOnSitTarget(), PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION); 
			} else { // when they sit up!
llStopAnimation(anim);
		} 
	}  

Little edit since stopping animations is more fun since 1.9

Thanks Burke - the script I excerpted all that from has a bunch of other extraneous stuff in the ELSE cases that I yanked out for purposes of my post. For my own future reference, does failing to explicitly stop an animation have potentially bad side-effects?

Anti, that's doesn't give the prim a sit target, it removes any sit targets. You need something like <0.0,0.0,0.001> to add a sit target.

Thanks Keknehv, that's just an effect of me editing unnecessary specifics out of my script for the purpose of a generic example. Of course I forgot that <0.0,0.0,0.0> is something of a special case. Oops.

Original post edited.

I have come across an interesting issue when I was working on a go kart. I created a pose so that the driver was lying down. The interesting thing is since the vehicle was so low to the ground, the kart would not have all the wheels on the ground. The effect was that the person was sitting normally, and where the feet would be was below the ground. This caused the kart to float above this point.

I came to the conclusion that it doesn't matter what the animation is showing, but when the object is physical it treats the center point of the object as if the user was sitting.

To get around this issue, I just have the person sit at a 45 degree angle. This way the feet of the avatar is even with their ass. The mass of the avatar is now concentrated, and it greatly improved the vehicle handling. I made a modified pose, and it looks and drives perfectly!

Want to share this with everyone.

Overld

Hey, thanks for the quick and detailed replies .
When I get this thing working, I'll give you each a free copy .

- Jolan