Linking furniture to movable vehicles (i.e., boats)

[Jesse Sondyre]

Hi all,

I have a driveable houseboat in SL and am wanting to decorate it. However, I'm in WAY over my head in terms of rezzing furniture on it and linking it to the boat and having the scripts work. I know this is a pretty involved process and am wondering if there are any builders out there who might talk me through it or let me hire them to do it for me

Any information anyone can provide is much appreciated.

Thanks, Jesse

[Nika Talaj]

AFAIK, there's two ways of doing this.  

1. The most popular way is using AVSitter.   Generally one puts a set of AVSitter scripts in the boat's root prim, and when an avatar sits on the boat, AVsitter takes care of their positioning all over the boat, usually offering the sitting avatar a menu with a choice of places to sit.  AVsitter can also rez props for the sits (region permitting), e.g. fishing rods, coffee, book, etc.  In this case, you do NOT want to have animation scripts in any of the rest of the furniture.
2. In older or very simple boats, often there are only two or three places you want avatars to sit, and each of those has a cushion or chair with a simple anim script that may/may not put up a simple menu of different sits.  This would probably be easier for you to do.

AVsitter is a powerful, but surprisingly easy to use, open-source animation system.  It's driven by notecard.  You can learn it yourself from various instructions and tutorials, see  https://avsitter.github.io/  If you learn it, you will find that it's pretty easy to take anims from furniture that you really like and put them into full-perm items or other mod furniture that looks great and has terrible anims.