I Fixed PARKOUR in Minecraft

I believe I could make a pretty sweet parkour system in Minecraft. Many have tried before me, but to my knowledge, no one has done a good job without using mods. I’m going to be making an entirely custom server using Minestom, because it allows me to write custom code for the player,

Something that is normally rather difficult. The first thing I want to add is wall running. In Minecraft, this is actually pretty simple, because everything’s on a grid, so we don’t need to worry about curved surfaces. First, let’s track which walls the player is touching.

We’ll have a list of North, East, South, and West. We don’t need to track up and down because we can already run on the floor. Basically, what the code is doing is checking a little point just outside the player’s hitbox. If it’s inside a solid block, we’re touching a wall.

Do this for all four directions a wall can be, and you’ve got yourself wall detection. Now we can make it so when we start touching a wall, it plays a little bonk sound as you hit it. [bonk sound] Ouch.

Parkour is all about preserving momentum, so if a player stands right up against a wall and jumps, nothing should happen, right? But if they’re running at a wall and moving upwards when they hit it, they’ll do a wall climb.

The height of the climb depends on how fast you’re moving at the moment of impact. As you slide back down the wall, we’ll give the player a little bit of slow falling so they have time to turn and jump off the wall. Now, since you’re in the air, you can’t technically jump.

You know what input you can do in the air, though? Double tap to fly. While you’re on a wall, we actually sneakily enable flying, just so we can detect the start flying input. If you double tap jump, you’ll start flying for an instant and then be launched off the wall

And your flight permissions taken away. In case you never noticed, this is how those double jump plugins work that you always see in server lobbies. Anyway, that’s wall climbing, but what about wall… running? Well, for that, we take the same detection for when you run into a wall but check which way

The player is facing. If they’re facing along the wall, looking slightly towards it, then we initiate a wall run. Here, the server takes complete control of your movement. It gives you a slight levitation effect to slow your fall (different from slow falling I swear)

And keeps your momentum the same during the wall run. Your vertical momenum is also preserved at the start of the wall run. This makes it feel like an extension of your jump, not a weird zoop forwards. Also makes it more skillful!

Eventually, if you’re on a wall for too long without jumping off, you will fall off the wall. Finally, to make it perfect, I added this quiet footstep noise. [quiet footstep noise] This is my favorite part. Next parkour move: sliding. This one’s actually quite easy once you know the trick.

When a player is running, and they press the sneak key, we put them into the elytra flying state. This smoothly lowers the camera to the ground and makes the player’s hitbox one block tall. Then we just keep sliding them forward for a couple seconds then pop them back upright.

Because elytra flying changes your hitbox, this allows you to slide right thru one block gaps, and is super satisfying. Next up: vaulting. [jingle plays] I really wanted to make it so that your arms would smoothly animate to reach out

And grab fences as you jump smoothly over them but man, that’s a whole other video. Number four: springboards. In Mirror’s Edge, there’s this mechanic where you can use little boxes, stairs, and ledges as a springboard to do a big jump.

I tried to do that here by making it so when you jump off a slab or stair, it gives you a little extra boost in the direction you’re going. “Now that’s realistic!” And finally, the creme de la creme, the coolest part of this moveset, Real. Parkour. Rolls.

Not that fake datapack thing where you teleport the player to look at a circle at 20 fps. Smooth, buttery rolls. But first, we need to add fall damage. Alright, when you fall from a height, and hit the ground, instead of dying, you just get real slow and can’t jump.

If you want to avoid this, you’ll have to do a perfectly timed parkour roll. [epic music plays] By pressing sneak at just the right moment, I will [epic music continues] activate PK Roll, negating all fall damage and- [epic music stops] Hoooly frick, did you see that animation? This here is vanilla minecraft!

Okay, so how the heck does that work? Well you see, it’s using a custom shader built into this resource pack. Shaders run client-side and at 60 fps, meaning we can do a perfectly smooth roll.

But we can’t move the camera. No, what this is really doing is lifting the world up to your face and spinning it around you. Yeah. [jingle plays 2: extended director’s cut] [jingle continues but lowers in volume] And how does it look in third person, you may be asking? Well, let’s just say…

It doesn’t. However in first person it looks slick as heck! I even added a tiny animation to the arms so it feels like you’re moving. [jingle fades] So let’s see what YouTubers think of this! [ominous music plays] [buildup] [oh no I am scared] [music continues] Make a video… please… [music continues]

[music continues] open obs (good recording software), open minecraft, set obs so it records minecraft, press start recording, do stuff, end the video, press stop recording, open your editing software, add cool effects, render, open youtube.com, press the icon with an arrow pointing upwards at the top right, select the video you rendered, add details about video, wait for it to upload, repeat the process

[music ends] I don’t know many YouTubers, and frankly… This project is so broken, I don’t really want to show it to them. I’ve been sitting on this for six months, and that is only the video. I have been sitting on this project for well over a year now.

I started this when 1.18 was new, alright? I have been taking far too long to get this one darn video out. And let me tell you, it’s not because I’ve been working on it. Or thinking about it. Basically, I told myself I’d record some stuff with some YouTubers but then I told myself

That I would “finish” the “project” first, because right now certain things don’t work in multiplayer. Genuinely, I forget what. I just know that it was broken. And, uh, [exasperated laugh]. I didn’t really want to go showing off a broken project to my friends. And so I kinda let this thing languish.

And then I kinda got big distracted. So yeah. Anyway, I think I’m going to release the source code for this. No guarantees that it’ll even work, but if you wanna look at it, if you wanna mess around, I say go for it.

If you are a Kotlin enjoyer, who maybe wants to see how I did something with a very, very outdated version of Minestom, I tried updating this to 1.19. Didn’t work. Did not work. It just refused to be ported, and so it lives forever in Minecraft 1.18.2, and I’m content with that.

That’s as far as I want to take this iteration of this project. Now, there was a months long detour where I tried to learn modding. The thing about learning modding is that it’s actually really hard, and I did pretty good at it, but I realized I was basically going to have to

Write my own animation library from scratch or heavily modify someone else’s animation library to the point where it’s no longer recognizable as the same piece of software, and I decided against it. I kinda bailed. I was like, “You know what? I don’t even have the first video out.

Why am I working on a whole second thing?” So that’s what happened to this. Anyway, I’m excited to greet the rest of 2022 with open arms. Wait a second, what year is it? Oh. [outro music plays] [outro music pauses] Oh damn. [outro music continues]