Parkour in Ultra Engine

[Alienhead]

I had a guy in the Ultra discord server ask me how to do parkour after I showed a video.. While it's really not a technique to explain over discord, I told him I would post a video and a short description on how I went about doing it. I'm certain there are other methods but I really wanted preformat over drop-dead accuracy. 

In the video, I attached 2 cubes to the parkour solvers as to better show what's happening behind closed doors. The light blue, or cyan cube is the 'collector' and the purple or magenta, cube is the 'feeler'. 

What happens here is the feeler tests the area around the player at different update frequencies, it then reports back data to the collector. The collector then decides which data is relevant based off the players location and angle.

Once the 'useable' data is determined, it is sent to the player controller where, based off user configurable settings, it is interpolated into an action (hurdling over a box for example).

You'll have to pay close attention to see the feeler and the collector in action, the cubes hardly show everything they are doing but at least you'll get an idea. 

Most geometry sensor systems use up to 14 feelers, while that makes for a very realistic simulation I find it not so practical for game use. I originally was going to use just 'a one pass sample' of the geometry around the player for speed purposes but I found I couldn't do everything I wanted to do with that system. So after reading up on the process I went with a 2 sensor system at little to NO cost on performance. Now that the system is in place I can do a lot more with it rather than just simple vaulting ( as this video demonstrates ), so over the next few months you'll probably see a lot more stuff in my videos based off this system and you won't even know it!  Wall runs is on the horizon !

One thing to keep in mind, the map is not staged in any way, this is straight csg brushes made with Ultra editor and dropped into the scene. The system is completely dynamic so there's no extra map configuring required (which is a major plus in my book). I cannot wait until I have time to build a real map with texturing and imported mesh, that's when this system will truly shine I believe, and yes. the system will work with imported geometry. 

Thanks to Ultra Engine for making this possible!  ( and Josh with his emergency bug fixes and API additions. ).