Vehicle

A Vehicle is a special type of nested room that moves instead of the actor in response to travel commands. When an actor in a vehicle types, for example, "go north," the vehicle moves north, not the actor.

In most cases, a Vehicle should multiply inherit from one of the other nested room subclasses to make it more specialized. For example, a bicycle might inherit from Chair, so that actors can sit on the bike.

Note that because Vehicle inherits from NestedRoom, the OUT direction in the vehicle by default means what it does in NestedRoom - specifically, getting out of the vehicle. This is appropriate for vehicles where we'd describe passengers as being inside the vehicle, such as a car or a boat. However, if the vehicle is something you ride on, like a horse or a bike, it's probably more appropriate for OUT to mean "ride the vehicle out of the enclosing room." To get this effect, simply override the "out" property and set it to nil; this will prevent the NestedRoom definition from being inherited, which will make us look for the OUT location of the enclosing room as the travel destination.

Modified in en_us.t[2810]:
English-specific Vehicle changes

class Vehicle : NestedRoom Traveler

An OUT command while within a vehicle could mean one of two things: either to GET OUT of the vehicle, or to ride/drive the vehicle out of its enclosing location.

There's no good way of guessing which meaning the player intends, so we have to choose one or the other. We choose the ride/drive interpretation as the default, for two reasons. First, it seems to be what most players expect. Second, the other interpretation leaves no standard way of expressing the ride/drive meaning. We return nil here to indicate to the OUT action that we want the enclosing location's 'out' connector to be used while an actor is in the vehicle.

For some vehicles, it might be more appropriate for OUT to mean GET OUT. In these cases, simply override this so that it returns nestedRoomOut.

Get the "location push traveler" - this is the traveler when a push-travel command is performed by a traveler within this location. If the object we're trying to push is within me, use the contained traveler, since the contained traveler must be trying to push the object around directly. If the object isn't inside me, then we're presumably trying to use the vehicle to push around the object, so the traveler is the vehicle or something containing the vehicle.

Determine if an actor is traveling with me. The normal base class implementation works, but it's more efficient just to check to see if the actor is inside this object than to construct the entire nested contents list just to check to see if the actor's in that list.

Traveler preconditions for the vehicle. By default, we add no preconditions of our own, but specific vehicles might want to override this. For example, a car might want to require that the doors are closed, the engine is running, and the seatbelts are fastened before it can travel.