Setting the parameters of your motorboat

Building your own Boat
Notecard parameters for sailboats
Customizing the HUD.
Making your own mesh sails.

Instructions on how to control your boat.
Using the main navigation page of the HUD.
Setting up your boat.

The root keel prim has a note-card inside that allows you to change different parameters. The root prim of the boat has parameters like the friction with water and the forces from the different sail types. Some other instruments, passenger and co-pilot seat prims have notecards. Every time the boat rezzes, it will look for a file named .params in the keel and read all the parameters about your boat from it. Below is the list of parameters for motorboats: Each line in this file is supposed to look like a LSL statement: Lines starting with // are comments, each NAME=VALUE pair must be on a line by itself.\ Semicolons and comments are optional. Symbolic values like ZERO_VECTOR are not supported.

pilotsit=<-1.5,0.35,0.5>;        //default pilot sit position
pilotrot=<0,0,0>;        //face-forward Euler rotation of pilot
fricwat=0.10;        //friction with water, 0 to 1.0
fricgnd=0.55;        //friction with ground, 0 to 1.0
accmot=0.10;        //acceleration from motor in one second
bankper=0.15;           //percentage of motor thrust that goes into banking
skyoff=2.0;             //distance to bring boat above prim water at skybox altitude
watoff=0.50;             //distance to bring boat above the “Linden Water”
maxride=3;        //what ride modes to allow, 1=private only, 2=private&free_ride, 3=also captain
phantom=0;	//1 means make the boat phantom while moving
motmax=10;			//number of foreward speed settings
motmin=-5;		//number of reverse speed settings (0 or negative)
maxhealth=1000;   //value of boat “health” when it has no damage
repair=1;  //how much to repair per second
takedamage=1;  //0=ignore hits by other weapons, 1= plkayattention to damage messages
CameraPitch = 10.0;			//The dynamic camera values have the same functions
CameraDistance = 6.0;		//as the parameters from the llSetCameraParams call
CameraBehindnessAngle = 0.0;	//refer to the Wiki for the similarly named rule values
CameraBehindnessLag = 0.6;
CameraLag = 0.3;
CameraFocusLag = 0.05;
CameraFocusOffset = <0,0,0.4>;
CameraFocusThreshold = 0.3;
CameraPositionLag = 0.3;
CameraPositionTreshold = 0.0;
How do you know what to set the physics parameters to? Leave them at these default values and try out the boat! If the acceleration from thrust is too quick for a large boat, decrease accmot. If the boat drifts too far after turning the motor off, increase fricwat. A low fricgnd value will allow your boat to motor on the ground in an unnatural way, but it should be low enough to allow you to launch off a beach or recover from running aground.

Co-Pilot Prim:

To allow multiple bridges on large ships there is a separate prim for a co-pilot. Anyone sitting on this seat can control the engine throttle with the up/down keys and steer the ship with the left/right keys. You could link several of these into a ship for more than one co-pilot or extra bridge. Don't use this for regular passengers, use the “Extra Seat” prim for passengers who don't need to control the ship. Both co-pilots and regular passengers can wear a HUD and control some boat features with that. I recommend that you change the HUD to NOTRANS before you give copies of it to others.

The Co-Pilot prim has it's own animations and .params file for setting it up. The prim looks for three animations in inventory: ShipsWheelC is for the co-pilot facing forward (centered). ShipsWheelL is the co-pilot when turning left, and ShipsWheelR is the co-pilot turning right. You can put your own animations in the prim, but they have to have those three names (exactly, with capitols). By default the co-pilot stands directly over the prim, if you change the animations, you can re-position the avatar by moving the prim or by changing the position and rotation in the .prams file inside. The options for this notecard are:

sitoff=<0,0,1.2>;        //position of the center of the avatar, relative to the prim
sitrot=<0,0,0>;            //rotation of the avatar in degrees on each axis