Features

Reference for every system oxide-baitcar ships. Each section explains the in-game behavior and the configuration keys that govern it.

Overview

A bait car is a regular civilian vehicle that an officer has chipped. To civilians it looks identical to any other car in the world. To officers in Config.AllowedJobs, every active deployment is visible as a map blip, in the dashboard or remote, and through a live event feed.

The system is asymmetric on purpose: civilians cannot tell a chipped car from a clean one. Even the screwdriver-use removal flow (triggered from inside any vehicle) returns identical "found nothing" messaging on a clean vehicle, a failed roll, and a rate-limited request. This keeps the item from being weaponized as a free bait-car detector.

Deployment

A deployment is created when an officer uses the chip item (Config.ChipItem, default baitcar_chip) while sitting in a target vehicle.

The install flow:

Deployment guard rails:

• Plate uniqueness. A plate that is already an active deployment is rejected. Servers using auto-generated plates inherit that uniqueness; servers reusing plates need to wait for the first deployment to be decommissioned before re-chipping.
• Per-officer cap. Officers can hold at most Config.MaxDeploymentsPerOfficer (default 3) active deployments simultaneously. The cap is per character id, not per source, so disconnecting does not free a slot.
• Inventory check. The chip is only consumed after every other gate passes. A failed inventory remove cancels the deployment.

Operating Modes

Config.UseRemoteController picks between two operating modes. The two modes are mutually exclusive.

In both modes the dashcam, all remote actions, and the dashcam recording hotkey work identically. The remote-controller mode is appropriate when you want the officer to physically carry the device (and risk losing it on death / search). Dashboard mode is appropriate when the controls should be available any time the officer is on duty.

Dashboard

The dashboard is the Vue 3 view that the /baitcar command opens. It is also reachable from the radial entry Bait Car -> Open Manager. The dashboard shows:

• Deployment list — every active deployment with plate, vehicle model, install timestamp, and current state (locked / engine / steering / speed limit / strobe / alarm / triggered flag).
• Stat tiles — count of active deployments, triggered count, and other rollups derived from the live deployment list.
• Event feed — the live officer-only feed (see Audit Log and Live Event Feed).
• Action buttons — lock / unlock, engine kill / restore, watch dashcam, set GPS waypoint, decommission.

Remote Controller

The remote is a Vue view styled as a handheld device. It is opened by using the baitcar_remote item (with Config.UseRemoteController = true). It shows:

• Signal strength bars derived from the officer's distance to the bait car.
• Live telemetry — speed, heading, current street and zone, fuel level, engine and body health, occupant list (when the entity is in scope).
• Full action surface — lock / unlock, engine kill / restore, steering modes, speed limiter, strobe, alarm, horn pulse, dashcam viewer, waypoint, and decommission.

Because the remote is an inventory item it is subject to your inventory's loss-on-death and search behaviors.

Dashcam

The dashcam attaches a scripted camera to the bait car and plays it back through a Vue HUD overlay. Officers can open the dashcam from the dashboard, the remote, or the radial Watch Nearest Dashcam shortcut.

Camera profile resolution is layered. For each field (fov, offset, rotation), the value is taken from the first layer that defines it:

Behavior:

• The camera is re-rotated every frame to track the vehicle's heading plus the configured yawBias.
• A slow poll (every Config.Dashcam.pollIntervalMs, default 2500 ms) confirms the vehicle still exists, is in network scope, and still carries the oxide:baitcar statebag. If any check fails the dashcam closes itself with a reason (feed_lost, chip_removed).
• The exit keys default to Esc and Backspace (controls 200 and 177). Configure with Config.Dashcam.exitKeys.
• An optional timecycle modifier (Config.Dashcam.timecycleEffect) and strength produce a stylized CCTV look. Empty string disables.
• During playback the officer is invisible to themselves and core driving / combat controls are disabled to prevent input bleed.

The admin command /baitcardashcamtune lets you adjust offsets, pitch, yaw bias, and FOV live and produces a paste-ready Lua snippet. See Admin.

Remote Actions

All actions are server-authoritative. The client only fires the intent event; the server validates job permissions, looks up the deployment by plate, writes the new state into the entity statebag, logs an audit row, and broadcasts the deployment change to all officer clients.

The lock, engineDisabled, steering, speedLimit, strobe, and alarm fields all live on the entity statebag (oxide:baitcar) so every officer's dashboard or remote stays in sync without polling the server.

Drive-Off Trigger

Trigger detection runs entirely on the client of any non-LEO civilian who is in the driver's seat of a vehicle with the oxide:baitcar statebag.

The detector:

Server-side trigger handling:

• Validates the source is actually the driver of the vehicle (anti-spoof).
• Rejects LEO sources (officers can't trigger their own deployments).
• One-shot per deployment: a triggered = true flag is set, so subsequent fires from the same or other clients are ignored.
• Calls the configured dispatch adapter through olink.dispatch.CreateAlert with the Config.Dispatch payload, vehicle plate, model, and coords.
• Optionally applies Config.FakeWantedLevel (set to 0 to disable).
• Notifies every authorized officer with a Bait car triggered: <plate> toast.
• Writes a triggered row to baitcar_events with the suspect char id and coords.

A second dispatch alert fires the first time a non-LEO sits in the bait car, before they drive off and trip the trigger threshold. This uses Config.EntryDispatch (separate code, title, priority, and blip from the trigger alert) and routes through the same job list as the trigger — so every responder is notified, not just the deploying officer. Entry alerts are gated by Config.NotifyOfficerOnEntry, rate-limited per plate (one alert every 30 s regardless of source), and skipped for LEOs.

Civilian Search

Civilians remove a chip by using Config.RemovalToolItem (default screwdriver) from their inventory while sitting inside a vehicle. The item must be registered as a usable item in the customer's inventory framework; oxide-baitcar binds the use callback through olink.framework.RegisterUsableItem.

The flow:

The entry dispatch alert still fires the first time a non-LEO sits in a bait car, so officers see the suspect on the map even if the suspect immediately uses a screwdriver and gets lucky on the roll. A future inventory item will introduce a way to bypass the entry alarm; the screwdriver intentionally cannot.

Dashcam Recording

The recording pipeline routes through oxide-police so clips appear in the MDT Video Storage tab alongside bodycam clips. The pipeline is gated on three conditions at all times:

• Config.Recording.enabled = true
• GetResourceState('oxide-police') == 'started' (rechecked on every call; safe to start / stop oxide-police at runtime)
• The officer's job is in Config.AllowedJobs

Workflow:

Closing the dashcam (or losing the feed) automatically flushes and unmounts the recorder.

Audit Log and Live Event Feed

Every state change writes a row into baitcar_events. The full set of event_type values:

Rows include officer_charid, plate, model, the optional suspect_charid, an optional JSON coords object, and an optional JSON extra object. Indexes on officer_charid, plate, and event_type keep audit queries fast.

In addition to the database row, every Events.Log call broadcasts a oxide:baitcar:client:event event to every authorized-job client. The Vue dashboard subscribes to this and renders the event feed in real time. Non-officers never receive the broadcast.

Officer Blips

When an officer's job becomes authorized (on login or olink:client:jobChanged), the client fetches the active deployment list and attaches a map blip to each bait-car entity. The blip uses Config.OfficerBlip:

• sprite (default 225)
• color (default 5)
• scale (default 0.9)
• label — combined with the plate as <label> [<plate>]

Blips are non-short-range so they're visible at any zoom level. They auto-clear when the deployment is removed or the resource stops.