Teleporting vehicles should allow setting cling as spawn does

[alessiogambi]

Currently, the method to teleport vehicles requires an absolute position. If the z-value is not correctly specified, the vehicle might end up "in" the ground. It would be useful to have a cling option to set the z-value, like the spawn method.

It is challenging to define an appropriate behavior considering that the vehicles are also rotated and the roads are not flat. In those cases, the "correct" value of z is not easily defined. Alternatively, one could specify only the 2D coordinates and orientation and let BeamNG figure out how to "rotate" the vehicle in 3D to place it on the terrain/road

[EPI-BeamNG]

Hi Alessio,

apologies for a late reply.

The closest thing we already have is safeTeleport (lua\ge\spawn.lua). It samples a few positions around the target spot, checks for intersections, and also makes sure the vehicle is placed on the ground.

Are you trying to build your own positioning API or something?

You should really just be using safeTeleport. It already handles the spawn position and the correct rotation relative to the ground. It does a downward raycast on its own, but only up to 50m so if you can’t predict the height accurately, you willl need to raycast toward the ground first.

[alessiogambi]

Dear @EPI-BeamNG , no I am not trying to implement a positioning API. Rather the opposite :)

I'd like to use anything officially supported by BeamNG pay to place a vehicle on an uneven terrain. Is the safeTeleport already exposed via the API or shall it be invoked using lua.queue command?

Could you provide an example of how to use the functionality you suggest?

Thanks!