Vehicle help

Hi,
Odd request to be fair but, here goes. I'm trying to make a vehicle that mimics the movement of walking. Normal move rate, no rotation on anything other than the Z axis etc. But I'm having major problems setting the values right. Can anyone help me figure out a good set of values to make a vehicle that moves like a walking agent, without burying in hills or slowing down going up hill etc?
Many thanks,

Snow Cone

OK, there must be someone out there who's modelled the standard walking functionality using vehicle params. Any suggestions on the setup?
I'm not any good at vehicles and I need a pointer or two

Cheers,

Snow.

FWIW - my experience of vehicles.

I've never seen a truly comprehensive document that explains them. I suspect that if someone had figured out all the dependencies, they'd have either published the definitive tutorial (noticeably absent from the wiki after 2 years) or made money from it (more likely).

The supplied documentation from LL definitely does not work as advertised. Any vehicle that has been made has likely been achieved by trial and error to find the "sweet spot". If you change a parameter, it has unexpected side-effects. It can, in that way, cost you days of your time.

I suspect nobody (not even the LL coder of vehicles) really knows the simple answer to your question.

Not sure if that helps, or just discourages you. Maybe someone will IM you in-world and tell you that I'm talking BS and here's your script.

That seems to be your best hope
/esc

Hi. I am looking too for something like that. I've asked twice in-world but seems like nobody has one... I would like to let you know that you are not the only one looking for something like this ^^'

I hope we can find something about this. For what I can guess, the vehicle must reach it's maxium speed in less than 0.4 seconds, full brake in less than 0.2, not affected by hills and must be able to rotate always at the same speed. And... of course... play animations of walk/stand.

P.S: And almost forgot something very important... not to tilt, meaning that ground inclination won't made you look like you are Michael Jackson or Bela Fleck, always staying with the same tilt/inclination

hmmm I been looking for that to. because I love mecha and I keep seeing these mecha avatars, and keep thinking no no no, that isn't right, your pilot it, not be it.

But ether way, I've been studying the scripts and havn't got to do any vehicles yet. but see what has been done, and the limitations of the script as far a vehicles can go, i think other peices of script are going to be needed outside of the vehicles scripts,

I think i know how it should be done, and I'm going to be trying something soon, over the next month or 2 as i wrap my head around heaps of scripts.

well thats all i got on it. find me in world if ya get a chance.
Laygeaux

Vehicles are rocket science to me and I've found that mostly other scripters are very helpful but seem to clam up when it comes to vehicles - so I guess I'm not alone.

There are puppet type animation programs available which allow you to animate prims - I know there is a free - or low cost one in one of the two major off-world boutique or exchange stores (don't think I'm allowed to advertise their names in the forum).

You may be able to use these to adavantage.

I do wish someone would come up with a decent Vehicle tutorial - and yes I know the Wiki one but we need one to demonstrate and explain the real use of the various parameters and floats - half the time all we can get is a parameter name and (if lucky) a brief description.

heyas snow;

good luck, i asked this a while back under 'making a transparent vehicle.' and yeah, still no concrete answers. your .4 and .2 acceleration and braking are the closest ive seen to ANYthing concrete!

i think the trick is to learn vehicle coding so you KNOW how to set parameters to achieve the results you want. the daunting thing is, there are so many. and yeah, they're nuts.

another approach would be to find an open-source vehicle that most closely matches the affect you want to achieve, and then get in there and start tinkering with everything, and see what happens. i had some success doing this recently, but it was a non-physical vehicle, and it went up hills, but not down.


once you get the movment working right, doing the animations can be a whole 'nother script. i fiddled with that this morning, and also found out it wasn't as hard as i thought it would be. of course, i only did standing and walking. you want to figure in running, flying, turning and all that.... gonna be dicey. then again, those animations could be linked to the controls, i'm thinking.

oh, and then there's human movment and the 1500 different ao walks they could have.

Thanks for the replies all.
I'm not discouraged yet
Someone in world suggested I try throttling back a car script.
I'd not tried that as the only vehicle script I had was for a mo'bike.
I'll let you know if I get anything satisfactory.

Thanks again.

Well...I can say that with vehicles there is millions of ways to do things and none of them are wrong.

Asking someone how to make a 'walking' vehicle it essentially way too open-ended and there's too many variables that are not taken into account with that request.

Physics are a tough thing to deal with and cannot be taken just with a script...the size/shape/link order can all come into play pluse more when making a vehicle...so while you could drop a script from one ship to another and it will fly similar to the original, it will not fly the same, and in some cases might not fly at all (or drive).

There are tons of freebie vehicle scripts, so the best advice any vehicle creator can give you is to take one of those and just play with it until it does what you want...because only You know that.

That's just the solution Tiarnalalon! I searched for "free vehicles" found a freebie box and there was an army truck that, when throttled down and with the correct size bounding box prim, darned near did the job!
Just a few tweaks here and there and it'll be perfick!
Thanks again guys

Snow

Could you send us that box?

Anyway, I think the best way to do this is a SLED vehicle with hovering... but it is still confusing. (I tried and failed)
Also, requires to determine the avatar size to get a correct position and all that :/

heehe;

yeah, snow, you gonna share? forget the box, give us the tweaked version you made!


(ah, snow's gonna sell it and make a million lindens....)

;)

I to am working on a quadrupedal walking vehicle based on the BattleTech Sloth Battle Armor. My plan as wall was to work with a car script as the base, and as it will be a quadruped I would like mine to act very much like a car leveling its self the the yaw, pitch and roll of the terrain. The trick I would like to pull off is to do this without having to use invisible skids to stop the vehicle from tilting when it lefts a leg. I'll let you know how it works out for me. right now I would be happy to get it moving with the legs remaining static.

Then... remember the box again!

heyas;

i got the simple motorcycle script and tweaked it to create a horse-drawn hansom cab. here are some things that i have learned, although not necessarily directly related to the vehicle scripting:


1: the shape of the vehicle makes a big difference.

this may not be as true for hover or air-flight vehicles, but for something going along the ground? oh yeah.

i started with a cube, and kept keeling over on turns. so i changed it to a wide plank. then i kept tipping on my nose. so i made it a long, wide plank!
but then, the area where we were running this vehicle had some 'potholes' in the roadways, where edges of the prims making up the road weren't the same height. we'd hit one of those and stop DEAD. until i change the long plank into an oblong sphere. the raised nose of the sphere allowed it to ride up over these un-matched edges.



2: animation controls should be programed in the vehicle steering controls

moving_start and moving_end gave me really haywire results. in both physical and non-physical vehicles, moving_start kept triggering rapidly in succession. and it made my animations (avatar and for the wheels) sputter with starts and stops.

if you look in the controls, you should find two triggers for each control: one when the control is on, and one when the control's on/off status changes. using each control check event, you can then plug in the animation starts and stops.

for example:
forward on & forward change = stop standing animation, start walking animation
(that's forward key first pressed)

backward on & backward change = same as above (unless you have a specific walking-backwards animation, then use that one, of course.)

right on/left on = star walking anim.
i did this one this way, because you might be standing and doing a non-moving turn, so this would make the legs move during that.

all off & changed = stop walking anim, start standing anim.
(this is when all the keys are let go, which should bring you to a stop.)



and remember to stop any sitting animations when the avatar sits on the vehicle. turn off the generic sit, and also turn off the ao sit if you know what it is called. (that drives me nuts with my riding drake saddle from grendels, whenever i stop walking in it, i lie on my side.)

yes there is a walking vehicle. It is called the Rendezvous Animator and you can find it at Muse Isle. It took months of experimentation and tweaking to make it work, but check it out. Most of what I could tell you are trade secrets, so I cannot divulge them here, but if you want to see a product that actually does do walking, flying swimming animations in motion, check it out.