Script functions?

I haven't played Rigidchips in quite a while, and I need a bit of a freshening-up on certain script functions.

1.) What is the function to detect altitude?

2.) What is the function to detect velocity?

3.) Could you list some other useful script functions?

1. _Y([chipname]) will detect the absolute height of the chip with NAME=[chipname], which defaults to the core if left blank. However, this only tracks chips on your vehicle.

To track another vehicle's height, you use _PLAYERY([number]), which tracks the enumerated player's core chip. However, all of the _PLAYERX/Y/Z() commands have 5m of noise built in, to prevent instagibby auto-snipe scripted weapons. As far as I know, you also can't track non-self chips other than another player core, which means anyone who knows how to use the _BYE() command can make a vehicle that can eject its core and evade such tracking.

2. Velocity can be tracked via _VX(), _VY(), and _VZ(), as well as _VEL() if you're not using Lua. (If you are, you can go in and manually define _VEL() as the modulus of the first three commands.) As with the _Y() function mentioned earlier, these commands default to measuring from your vehicle's core chip if left blank, or a different named chip if that name is entered in the parenthesis.

3. _KEY() and _KEYDOWN() have become my best friends in writing scripts, obviously. For creating visual displays, the DRAW/LINE2D and DRAW/LINE3D commands are neccesary, and in general understanding of trigonometry so that you can make use of _SIN() and _COS() is invaluable.

Highly useful utility/"informational" commands (i.e. commands I usually set to print in order to give me live test data on a vehicle's performance) are _WEIGHT(), _FUEL(), and _E().

For creating mouse-controlled systems, the mouse commands are obviously neccesary; _ML() & _MR() (mouse click detectors), _MX() and _MY() (tracks relative position on the screen, kind of fiddly). Vital however are _WIDTH() and _HEIGHT(), as these autodetect the width and height of your screen/the game window, allowing you to calibrate the mouse without exhaustive guess-and-check for every new screen and computer.

In general, I can't reccomend enough that you take a look through Fredsmith's posted copy of the English-translated game documentation, which I've come to use as my Bible for scripting in Rigidchips. If you scroll about a third of the way down, you'll come to the script section, which has a near-exhaustive list of the various commands and what they do.