In which more peculiarity occurs; also, a vehicle

I was innocently sitting at home, minding my own business, when a hovercar pulled up above my property, stopped, and one of the occupants opened up with an automatic weapon. Either it was a rather ineffective one or it missed, because nothing appeared to happen. Then, the car flew off. This all took a few seconds and I was entirely unable to respond with any form of responding fire. I have a Seburo for these purposes, you know.

Anyway, I've been investigating vehicles. These are relatively complex things to build, but I think that I've now got most of the issues involved. There are a number of different parameters to do with movement that one needs to get right, and one needs to understand how to take controls, but as far as the movement goes there seem to be only two major things to understand:

1. Linear motion - you move yourself left, right, forwards, backwards, up and down with linear thrust, and you use linear friction parameters to control when you stop;

2. Angular motion - the same, but as concerns spinning you around. You might also want to use the VEHICLE_VERTICAL_ATTRACTION parameters to keep the vehicle upright.

It's all relative to the rotation of the vehicle, so if you thrust up but you're pointing towards the ground you'll go horizontally. Really, it seems daunting playing with the scripts concerned, but if you start from one of the basic sample vehicle scripts you'll get the hang of it in no time.

So here is the AG "Bandit" Skimmer v0.5.1...





with my good self piloting it. It has two main modes, controlled by voice commands - "hover" where the vehicle keeps a constant height above the ground or sea (which you can move up or down) or "fly", where you can thrust up or down in the same way that you would thrust back or forwards. As well as that, the anti-gravity can be turned on and off, and there's a front-mounted gun:



which fires a pointless red plasma bolt that explodes rather prettily on contact with anything:



though, at the moment, it seems to detonate immediately on leaving the skimmer if it's not moving. I'll fix that. When you're moving it's fine. Should there be a call for it, the bolt could also kill people or cause them other discomfort, though it's really just for show.

I'm not pimping for sales here by the way - contact me in-game and say "I read your blog" and I'll be quite happy to give you a copy of any of the objects mentioned here. I'm not much of a saleswoman. I just don't care, really. Certainly if you're interested in how any of the bits work, I will tell you, at length, until you're so bored you wish there was a way to remove your ears.