The controlledBy property sets from whom updates to the vehicle's position will come from.

Setting the vehicle's controller to the player gives responsibility for the vehicle's movement to the player's client.

# Give control of the Ripper to the client. At this point the
# client Ripper will get a .physics member.
self.controlledBy = avatar.base

cell/Ripper.py

In the example above, controlledBy is set to the player's client, thus giving it the ability to dictate the position of the vehicle. Setting controlledBy back to None returns control to the vehicle's cell.

In order to allow the vehicle to respond to user inputs, you can make the vehicle become the player.

To do this, you will need to implement a specialisation of the vehicle's client entity (in the same file) with the name Player<entity name>. For example, a client entity type of Avatar would require a corresponding PlayerAvatar.

Setting the player:

BigWorld.player( <entity_to_become_player> )

Changing the player as above will trigger the become player and become non-player events in the appropriate entities. You can use these callbacks to configure and later cleanup the user input handling mechanisms.

class PlayerRipper( Ripper ):
    def onBecomePlayer( self ):
        self.setupKeyBindings()
        self.filter = BigWorld.PlayerAvatarFilter()
        FantasyDemo.cameraType( keys.FLEXI_CAM )
        ...

    def onBecomeNonPlayer( self ):
        self.pilotAvatar = None
        self.filter = BigWorld.DumbFilter()
        self.keyBindings = []

client/Ripper.py