Always Up!
Turn any map into a procedural parkour challenge
Any similarities to actual games, living or dead, is purely coincidental :p
Thanks Ctop for the demo video 😉
FEATURES
– Always Up!: When active, generates a parkour challenge on any map you play.
CHARACTERISTICS
– This mod generates a procedural parkour challenge on any map using the elements already present in the map at startup.
– Initial parkour generation may take some time, please be patient (or reduce the generation distance in the options).
– The seed available in the option determines the path of the whole parkour, changing it lets you get different parkour path on the same map.
– One map and one seed will always generate the exact same parkour path for every player (unless some update of the mod chages it).
– The parkour difficulty increase every 50m of height, up to maximum difficulty at 200m.
– Your objective is to climb as high as possible.
– You are allowed to use any tool from the base game.
– All parkour pieces are destructible (some might require explosives).
– Your score will be saved for every map and seed combination.
– If your score is greyed out while on the ground, it means the mod thinks you cheated, as long as you are in this state your best score won’t update, try to walk to a lower point to get it back on tracks.
KNOWN BUGS
– Part of the parkour can cross itself and block the intended path: this is why you are allowed to use tools, blow you way through 😉
– Some jump seems way too long to be doable: First remember that Bluetide is a thing, then look around to see if a lower platform could not help.
– I broke a mandatory piece of the path and now I can’t complete it: Time to restart the map and try not to break it next time :/
– My game lags every time my best score increases: Disable the options that saves score every change.
DEV NOTES
This is the touching story of a mod that was created, almost completed, then lost during my last PC transition, and finally rebuilt from its ashes… But nobody cares about this kind of story so lets talk about the content of the mod itself :p
First of all one of the main reason I decided to give this mod another chance after losing its source code once was one of the new features introduces in 1.5.4: the ability to tell if a point is or not out of bounds on any map! This was a crucial part of this mod as I am generation parkour pieces that the player must walk on and obviously if those pieces are generates out of bouds the player cannot possibly reach those >_<
About the parkour generation steps, I had most of them in mind still, so I just had to recode them: first I looked for all parts of the map that have collisions and made a huge list with all of them to be easily able to duplicate them (even if the player destroys the original shapes they come from).
I also wanted to have some sort of difficulty increase over time, so I set fixed heights where the difficulty would increase so that pieces placement become harder and harder with altitude.
Then I pick one of those parts, spawn a copy of it, rotate it a little based on the difficulty level, find out where the player will enter and exit the part, and place the entry point near the exit point of the previous peice. I also added some gaps in between the peices to make it a little more challenging 😉
This goes on until a certain height above the player is reached and then stops for a while until the player reaches a certain height. Initally I had the parts generated progressively on the fly as soon as the player moved up, but this was generating quite a lot of frame drop and lag spikes as spawning lots of parts lags the game quite a lot… So I decided to pack the generation steps together and add a warning message so that you can expect when a lag spike will come and not miss that really hard jump because of lag :p
Also you may noticed that the screenshots of the mod and the map you play on are not exactly the same: this is due to a bug fix I noticed last minute that changes the order of every single piece generated -_- But don’t worry the seeded random generator works wonderfully and as long as you use the same seed on the same map everybody will get the exact same parkour challenge to play with so you can share and compare your score with others 😉
