Do you instantly teleport in it space-wise ? What happens regarding your hitbox, from other players POV ?
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Usually the player model just gets disabled altogether and the game sticks the camera to the vehicle instead. Remember, games don’t have to do anything in a way similar to the real world. For example, in [Iron Lung](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1846170/Iron_Lung/) the submarine you are piloting doesn’t move at all, it’s just chilling in the void and you’re actually controlling an invisible camera object in the map that projects what it sees onto the texture of the screen in the sub.
Sure, that can happen. The thing about games is there really isn’t any universal right way to do most things, so the developers just think “how can I make it do the thing I want,” and go from there.
Remember, the computer doesn’t know what players, vehicles, hit boxes, or even cameras are. The developers basically just decided to apply those labels to certain groups of numbers to help keep track of things when working on the game. To the computer it’s all just data, so how we manipulate that data is completely up to us.
Sure, if that’s how the developers chose to do it.
Look up some good old-fashioned UT2004 gameplay for a nice example.
It was really quite easy to get away with not having those animations in the early days, because quite honestly, just having vehicles in the first place was a novelty. For high paced action games, not having to faff around waiting for your character to get in the vehicle was actually a bonus.
Also, some of the dynamic animation libraries in modern games probably exceed the capabilities of the production tools people used to use. Before, every animation had to be canned, there was no physics simulation, the best you could hope for would be for a character to awkwardly move to a fixed position near the vehicle and run completely static pre-generated entry animation. Now we’re at the level where the game can just take the job that the production tool used to do, and generate a flexible, accurate animation on the fly, from whatever position the character is currently in.
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