Vehicles/StandOn?

[SickAlice]

So I'm full of questions about bounding boxes lately. This pertains to vehicles of course. Here's where my tests went but failed.

In FFEdit we add things first by adding their Template and then another addition in a different tab of course. In the Template tab a variety of parameters are available. A thing can be solid and it can have the Stand On option which is where I've been playing around. Things also get a category here, they can be characters of different associations, objects or of course vehicles.

So the first question would be and I haven't played around with this much yet is about that Vehicle category. My assumption is I give it that Vehicle trait then add it to a map. In game there it is and the character can interact with it of course. Now say I gave it the attributes of Stand On, likewise Solid and it has a proper bounding box of course. I can assume a character can then stand on top of it? I've made benches just to learn as well a sofa for my avatars bedroom with fairly precise boxes and this seems to work. But is there something else like can a character just up and drive around? I ask because that specific Vehicle trait is there as opposed to Object.

The other test that failed and then question was a made a test vehicle. The intention was a character could stand on it and then the vehicle was selectable and itself had a moves list thus you could move it around with the character hanging out on top of it. The long term was to make more complex things like for one example a van where characters could walk through a door and be standing inside of it then control the van which itself has projectiles and what not (The Ninja Turles van of course). The way I went about it was my Template was vehicle but I also made the same name in the Characters tab. I figured that was needed to control it and give it moves/powers. Stand On and solid of course, BBox of course. Nothing, characters couldn't stand on the test car at all. So I tried shots in the dark and changed the variable to Object then to Hero and such. Still nothing, characters can't stand on the thing no matter what it's doing. Import it as a static object? Totally fine, everyone can hang out and have a lunch break right on it.

So yeah, where am I going wrong here?

[Epimethee]

I remember playing around with this for FFX, with zero success. However, if it's for a specific character who doesn't need to b interactive while in the vehicle, maybe you could make a static copy of the character mesh and make it into an FX? The FX could then be applied on the vehicle.

[detourne_me]

I can't remember exactly which fax attributes there were, but I Think they were Vehicle and Driver attributes that you would give different herofiles. As the playable Driver character you could approach the non playable (not in your team) 'vehicle' and then take control of that character for a bit by using the 'drive' command. I forget if you had to assign specific drivers to vehicles or not.

I played around with the idea of the 'gestalt' attribute for mounted characters, too. Like He-man and Battlecat become a whole new character with He-man mounted on Battlecat. So you'd need 3 meshes and herofiles for that.

As for the Standon part of the question, i'm Not too sure if the stood upon mesh can move. I remember implementing something like that in my wrestling ring map. A steel folding chair was set up, with standon=1 and also ...pickup? Then once a character picked it up the mesh became a folded chair and could be used as a weapon, like a lamppost. If dropped, the mesh stayed in it's weapon form. This was a few years ago, though, so I'm not sure how well it worked out for furniture. I remember setting it up with the different nifs (set up or folded chair) for the different states, like a lamppost (before it's ripped out of the ground and after)

[SickAlice]

Yeah unfortunately new laptop doesn't seem compatible at all with FFX so I had to cut myself from the options it provides though the idea for me is to make something real basic that can leave options for modders and such, I just make the stock nifs and am looking at how I place BBox's and if those can even be used by other players after the fact or if it's a waste of time and effort that could be used elsewhere (noting the overall scale of my MOTU project here). I am curious though of course, I was placing my bets that this wasn't possible due to some hardcoded conflict somewhere but I've worked around things before, even prior to the existence of Nifskope, the second game engine and FFX. For example I long ago got Ninja Turtles to hold weapons in game with the actual weapon being present in the Nif just using FFEdit. There's always a glitch to exploit. Wish I wasn't such a basic programmer, I would just as well learn Niflib and update/fix the engine itself to account for these things or script whatever Python needed. Ty for the ideas of course and I'll test out this stuff when I have time. Always an exploit as I said and I'm always tripping over new ones so I won't count it out. Still wondering if there's something in the Template type and then character tab type I'm missing here. For some reason my brain wants to think this is where that compatibility issue happens, like the vehicle is tallied as one type thus cancels the other one out. This of course would be great to crack for all of us as it's been one of those things limiting mod makers for years now. If anyone does some experiments feel free to add the findings here.