View source for Conceptual Design: How Vehicles Work

{{CatUp|Conceptual Design: How and why things work in Roblox}}
Vehicles, at least the February 2008 versions, seem to work on one basic principle. Apply a force to a brick to make it go forward, and then apply some sort of turning force to make it rotate. Some have attempted to make a car with rotating wheels as the form of movement, but since major physics updates that has become farther and farther from the realm of possibilities.

Most vehicles of any sort nowadays rely on an original design of RobloxPolice, a scripter who entered Roblox in its early days and left the scene late summer 2007. He created a tool to control a car, using wheeled rotation in order to provide movement. This laid the foundation for Stealth Pilot, another early addition, to modify this tool into what would later become the Plane Tool. Modifications included, in the early versions, full keyboard controls for 3-D plane mechanics sans yaw, and the ability to fire a rocket. This slowly evolved into what is now, namely, the Plane Tool v3, with a mouse-guide system. This allows the plane's Engine brick to rotate to face where you click, allowing for some daring maneuvers.

Based upon this new technology, another scripter, Mr Doom Bringer, was tasked by a friend to create a ship that was drivable. Through testing it seemed that the Plane Tool was the only viable method, and he modified the script accordingly. This spawned a new generation of the tool, with only 2D movement along the ground. Using the new method he was able to create a myriad of other vehicle types, based on RobloxPolice and Stealth Pilot's creations.

The basic idea of a vehicle, as per Stealth Pilot's design, is to take a single brick and, through a mouse/keyboard interface, make it move forward at a certain velocity, and move to where the mouse is clicked. This creates a very stable platform for which one can add on more pieces to the basic plate, as well as editing the speed and possible forces on each axis to create a versatile vehicle platform.

A brick is applied a velocity, and a BodyGyro object is used to make it rotate accordingly. It is simple, yet intuitive and widely used for its stability.

Gamer3D is creating hovercrafts using [[GBX.lua.BodyThrust (Object)|BodyThrust]] and [https://web.archive.org/web/20090109230725/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting raycasting]. Right now, he's waiting for the dev-team to add fast raycasting.

At the moment, Ylsid is currently making a rocket car, it reacts far better to physics than the ones based on rotating wheels, as this one uses [[GBX.lua.BodyThrust (Object)|BodyThrust]] to move forward.

[[Category:Vehicles]]