[Feature Request] Bot Vehicles / Vehicle Spawn Plugin API

[lionkor]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. It would be very useful to be able to write a Lua Plugin, and spawn specific vehicles from there. We could simply allow the player to specify the path of a vehicle file, and parse & spawn that (not sure how easy that is), under some imaginary player name (with a special name, such as *<name>, like *James, to signify that it's a server-side vehicle).

Describe the solution you'd like An API to say MP.SpawnVehicle(configPath, position, rotation, ...) → table (made up, could be anything), and some functions to set velocity / position, and similar.

Discussion is welcome!

[OfficialLambdax]

Im trying to think of a use for this. One that comes up my mind is the modders ability to spawn props, like barriers and props on his server for events. For that either MP.SpawnVehicle() or a editVehicle() function should make it possible for the modder to make the cars player tag invinsible.

[lionkor]

Yeah, the prop thing was my main idea for now. Also spawning other cars, all the way up to potentially making ghost cars like your HC - that should all be possible in the future. The "definition of done" for this issue is the prop case working.

[Starystars67]

May I suggest a slight expansion to this and maybe break it up into a couple of functions:

MP.SpawnDummyVehicle() -- Good for spawning props and vehicles that do not require lua (Engine, Powertrain So on)
MP.SpawnVehicle() -- Good for spawning fully functioning vehicles
MP.SpawnProp() -- This calls the SpawnDummyProp() but is a nice to use wrapper for readability when making scripts for dynamic maps

Just my 2 cents. :)

[Starystars67]

With regards to the suggestion of a MP.editVehicle Maybe this can be broken down slightly based on how the client works into:

MP.GetVehicleConfig() -- This gets the JSON Object of the configuration of the vehicle for modification.
MP.SetVehicleConfig() -- This sets the vehicle configuration object.

Alternatively maybe we could do a MP.GetVehicle() which you can then call getters and setters on? This would be similar to how the object in-game is so that you only need to learn the vehicle object and how it works once for both game and server.