Tricking 0 · published · build 24939452
Alpha 5.0 is one of the biggest Tricking 0 updates so far.
It brings together most of the work completed since the beginning of 2026: a new cliff-jumping map, a complete rendering-pipeline migration, new tricks and variations, improved freefall control, major IK changes, a rebuilt trampoline system, a complete replay rework, direct video export, performance improvements, and many fixes across tutorials, locomotion, ragdolls, water, and quality settings.
A large part of the game’s underlying architecture has also been reworked to prepare for future systems such as scoring, progression, and career mode.
A new cliff-jumping map has been added, recreating the famous Pont du Diable spot in Hérault, France.
It is a beautiful canyon crossed by three bridges at three different heights.
You can jump from all three bridges, over or from the railings, from the truck, and send crazy cliff jumps and døds into the canyon.
A large amount of work went into making the vegetation dense while keeping its performance impact as low as possible.
A custom grass detail was created to blend closely with the terrain texture. Its appearance can be adjusted between greener and drier variations so that it remains consistent with the ground below it.
Several GPU-instancing solutions were tested before settling on a mixed approach.
The foreground therefore uses real individual trees, while much of the distant vegetation is made from impostors representing complete groups of trees.
The objective is to maintain dense vegetation throughout the canyon, including far into the distance, without filling the entire map with expensive individual tree objects.
Several community-requested tricks and variations have been added or reworked.
The input convention used for timed trick variations has been reorganized.
After entering a flip input, the player can enter a sequence using:
Within the current kick-variation system:
The position of each button in the sequence determines when the variation happens during the trick.
A Triple Cork contains three twists but has four possible variation slots.
Examples include:
This makes related variations more consistent. The sequence describes not only which variation is performed, but also when it happens during the trick. Leading As are ignored if they are not linked to a tweak performed with the left joystick.
Split Landings are now available.
They can currently be performed on tricks that would normally land:
To perform a Split Landing:
This uses input logic similar to tweaked trick variations.
Support for additional landing types such as Mega, Semi, and Turbo may be added later.
The ragdoll’s spine can now tilt to follow the movement of the arms.
Previously, moving the arms affected the character’s balance and rotation, but the torso remained comparatively rigid. The spine now contributes to the movement, allowing the player to generate aerial twists more quickly.
This makes the character:
Because the spine now contributes to the tilt, the total range of movement has also increased.
Players need to be more precise with their inputs, as the same arm movement can now produce a stronger reaction than before.
This gives the player more control, but makes accurate aerial positioning more demanding.
The foot IK system has received a substantial rework, particularly when the character is standing close to a ledge or balancing on a narrow rail.
Previously, feet could behave unpredictably near the boundary of a surface. A foot that was supposed to remain in the air could fail to detect a nearby valid support point, making precise positioning unnecessarily difficult.
When an unplanted foot is close to an edge, it now searches for the closest edge on which it can rest.
The character can also slowly reposition their body to keep their center of mass above their feet and maintain balance.
This makes it easier to:
The correction is gradual rather than instantaneous, allowing the character to naturally settle into a stable position.
Several additional IK bugs that occurred around edges and narrow surfaces have also been fixed.
Hand positioning during tucked tricks has been significantly improved.
The simulation rig used to create the animations does not perfectly match every in-game character rig. Because of this, the hands could appear incorrectly positioned during tucks.
The procedural IK system originally developed for ragdoll tucks in Freefall Mode is now also used during animated tucked tricks.
Animation curves control exactly when the IK activates and deactivates, allowing the hands to follow the body without interfering with the rest of the animation.
This has been applied to many tucked tricks, including:
The result is cleaner hand placement, fewer intersections, and more consistent tuck poses.
The trampoline system has been completely rebuilt.
The previous implementation could become desynchronized from the character’s animation. Depending on the selected transition, the character could appear to jump before or after the trampoline physically launched them.
The new system predicts both sides of the interaction.
When the player enters the trampoline, the game now:
This works with transitions that have very different timings, including fast transitions such as Punch and longer transitions such as Redirect.
Trampoline interactions should now feel much smoother, more synchronized, and more satisfying.
The locomotion system has been adjusted to make movement more responsive and enjoyable.
Changes include:
The ragdoll recovery system has been largely rewritten.
The previous logic did not always reliably distinguish between recovery on land, recovery in shallow water, and transitioning into swimming in deep water.
The game now handles three main recovery situations.
The character can stand back up when:
The character can stand back up when:
The character can transition into swimming when:
The stability timer is reset when the player is still moving too much, falling, descending quickly in water, airborne, or otherwise not in a valid recovery state.
Additional changes include:
Large parts of the replay system have been rebuilt.
The previous universal replay-frame structure has been replaced by specialized replay records for different types of data, including players, ropes, and controller overlays.
The system now uses fixed-size circular buffers instead of continuously shifting large frame lists.
This reduces memory operations, improves performance, and makes the replay system easier to expand in the future.
The old replay system recorded the positions of the character’s individual bones and interpolated linearly between them.
This caused problems during fast twisting movements.
A shoulder rotating around the body should follow a curved path around the rotation axis. With linear position interpolation, it instead moved directly from one recorded position to the next in a straight line.
The shoulder therefore cut through the inside of the curve instead of rotating naturally around the character.
Between recorded frames:
The new replay system reconstructs the character primarily from the rotations of the bones instead of directly forcing each bone toward an interpolated position.
Because the skeleton is now driven through its hierarchy, the rig preserves its structure much more accurately.
The system also uses more advanced interpolation:
The result is smoother replay playback that better preserves limb lengths, shoulder movement, the structure of the skeleton, and the original twisting motion.
Replays now detect teleport events.
Interpolation is disabled across teleport boundaries, preventing characters from flying, stretching, or smoothly travelling between unrelated positions.
When a teleport is detected:
Additional improvements include:
Fixed a visible pause or missing section that could occur when entering replay mode during a trick.
Recorded frame timestamps are now correctly adjusted when replay recording is interrupted, preventing gaps in the resulting replay.
Rope-swing state is now preserved when entering and leaving replay mode.
Previously, resetting the player for replay playback could unintentionally release the character’s hands from the rope.
The replay system can now:
A controller-input overlay has been added to replay mode.
It displays the inputs used during the recorded replay and supports both keyboard and gamepad displays.
The replay overlay follows the player currently focused by the replay camera.
When no specific player is focused, it displays the inputs of the player who originally paused the game.
The overlay can be enabled or disabled during replay by pressing:
Controller-overlay data is recorded alongside the replay so that the original inputs can also appear in exported videos.
Replays can now be rendered and exported directly from the game as MP4 videos.
The exporter does not simply record what is displayed on screen in real time. Instead, it evaluates the replay and renders every required frame independently.
This means the exported video is not limited by the performance or visual settings used while playing.
For example, you can play at:
And then export the replay as a clean clip at:
Even when your computer cannot run the game at 4K and 240 FPS in real time, it can still render those frames individually and produce a flawless final clip without real-time frame drops.
This is useful for:
The export menu supports:
During export, the game:
Controller-overlay and HUD settings have been reworked.
Tricking 0 has been migrated from the High Definition Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline.
HDRP offered advanced visual features, but many of them were too expensive to use while maintaining the performance required by a physics-heavy game.
The game was therefore paying part of the performance cost of HDRP without being able to take full advantage of its features.
The move to URP allows the game to maintain a similar level of visual fidelity while significantly reducing rendering costs.
The migration included:
The improved performance also creates more room for artistic direction.
With URP, the game can use additional post-processing without sacrificing as much performance.
This creates room for effects such as:
The objective is not only to improve performance, but also to give the game more personality and move away from an overly neutral presentation.
The Temple map has been migrated to URP and received a significant detail pass.
Changes include:
On the development setup, the map increased from approximately 80 FPS to more than 140 FPS in the Unity Editor.
Actual improvements will vary depending on hardware, resolution, and quality settings.
The Air Balloon map has been migrated to URP.
The distant-island shader was also reworked so that the island reacts correctly to different sun directions and times of day.
Hooked received rendering-pipeline migration work, material updates, shader fixes, and compatibility adjustments for URP.
Volumetric lights have been replaced by transparent cones that create visible beams of light at a much lower performance cost.
The object-selection effect used in the Spot Builder has been completely reworked.
The previous generic highlighting solution has been replaced with a handmade screen-space outline shader created specifically for Tricking 0.
It is used to highlight the object currently targeted for selection or editing.
The old teleport effect, where the character dissolved and reappeared, has been replaced because it did not make much sense within the game’s more realistic presentation.
Teleporting back to a session marker now uses a screen-space rolling-camera effect designed to suggest a short time skip rather than literal teleportation.
The idea is that the game is skipping the time it took the character to walk or climb back to the marker and prepare for another attempt. The route back is not shown, but the character is still implied to have travelled there normally.
The custom quality-preset system has been made more reliable.
Previously, loading a preset could break the settings menu when its saved rendering asset no longer existed or could not be found.
The tutorials received a large polishing and bug-fixing pass after playtests with less experienced players exposed several edge cases that could make some tutorials extremely difficult or impossible to finish.
The internal representation of tricks has been significantly reworked.
A centralized database now contains the tricks available in the game and provides a consistent source of information for systems that need to identify them.
This provides the foundation for:
The full scoring, progression, and career systems are not included in Alpha 5.0.
Online multiplayer has also been explored as a possible future direction, but it is not currently confirmed to fit within the scope of the game before the full 1.0 release.
A significant CPU and memory optimization pass was completed using the Unity Profiler.
Heavy string manipulation that was being performed every frame has been removed or replaced.
This reduces unnecessary CPU work and garbage generation.
Many dictionary-based bone lookups have been replaced with indexed lists.
This removes hundreds of string-key accesses that previously occurred every frame during animation and ragdoll processing.
Center-of-mass calculations have been optimized to reduce repeated work during physics updates.
The ragdoll air-drag system has been rebuilt.
Previously, it could cast hundreds of rays during every physics update, even at low speed.
The new implementation:
This significantly reduces the CPU cost of air-drag simulation while preserving its effect at higher speeds.
The replay system no longer repeatedly removes the oldest item from growing frame lists.
It now uses fixed-size circular buffers with looping indices.
This avoids constant list shifting and reduces CPU and memory usage during longer sessions.
Cleaned up obsolete, duplicated, and unused code and assets across the project, reducing unnecessary warnings and making future bugs easier to identify and fix.
Several internal development tools and workflows were also rebuilt.
These changes are not directly visible during gameplay, but they are benefiting the team by:
Thank you to everyone who voted in the community trick polls, submitted suggestions, tested the game, reported bugs, or shared reference clips.
A huge thank-you as well to everyone who took part in the playtests and helped expose bugs that would have been almost impossible to find while testing only as an experienced player.
Enjoy the Summer Update!