🎥 Launch video: 1.0 | 📒 Read the manual | 📜 Read the changelog | 🆓 Open source Core version |

Mover walks, falls, flies and swims. Jump at a ledge and it falls straight past it.

Foothold 1.0.0 adds the rest: climbing, ledge hang, ladders, mantle, glide, wall-run and slide, for Unreal Engine 5.8's Mover. Each one is a real Mover movement mode, not a montage bolted on top, so it predicts, rolls back and replicates the same way Walking does. A client that gets corrected halfway up a wall is still climbing afterwards.

It also sets up the Game Animation Sample's Mover character in one click, and it fixes foot placement on Mover pawns, which Epic's node can't do.

The seven moves:

• Mantle. Jump at an edge 45 to 150 cm above your feet and you pull yourself up and over. From a standing jump, that's ledges up to about 2.8 m.

• Ledge hang. Catch the edge, shimmy along it, climb up, let go, or climb down onto a climbable wall below.

• Climbing. On walls you tag Climbable, or on any steep wall if you'd rather. Hop up, top out, step off at the bottom.

• Ladders. Hands and feet go rung to rung, and you mantle off the top. Use the ladder actor, or put the component on your own mesh.

• Glide. From 3 m up, once your jump slows, press jump again. Steer and bank into the turns.

• Wall-run. Hit a wall at 45° or less at speed. Jump off it and you keep your forward speed.

• Slide. Sprint and hold crouch. It speeds up downhill, and jumping out keeps the speed.
  

Every number above is a setting in the Details panel.

Feet that actually touch the slope

Epic's Foot Placement node reads the Character Movement Component. On a Mover pawn it sees a flat floor, so on a 20° slope Manny's feet stay level, ankles 18 to 28 cm above the ground. Foothold's Foot Placement (Mover) node reads Mover instead and puts each foot down on the slope, ankles at their resting 9 cm. One menu command swaps your existing nodes and keeps their bones, alpha and links.

The Game Animation Sample in one click

Tools > Foothold > Set Up GASP Mover Character. Before it changes anything it shows you what it will change. It backs up every asset it touches, and it's safe to run again. I tested it on the GASP 5.8 download: afterwards GASP's own Mover character ran the demo course on GASP's own input actions, every section but the slide lane. GASP already has a good motion-matched slide, so the setup leaves that one alone. There's a commandlet too, if you want it in CI.

Your animations, on the wall

Foothold doesn't include animation clips. Select the hang, shimmy, climb, ladder and mantle clips you already have, choose Create Animation Set, and the Foothold Pose node plays them: blended by direction, matched to your speed, and with IK putting the hands on the ledge and the feet on the rungs. The Free Animation Library (free on Fab) works with it; the Mannequin in the trailer plays its clips.

No clips yet? Every mode has a procedural pose. It's programmer art: fine for building and testing your levels, not for shipping.

The details I cared about most: the arms reach up before the catch, the hands grip the edge with the fingers over it, and hands and feet stay out of the wall even when a clip swings them in.

Multiplayer

Tested with a listen server and a client. The template pawn and GASP's character each ran the demo course, and the server saw the same mode changes, in the same order, as the client. I haven't tested a dedicated server, a packaged game or a real network with lag and packet loss yet, so I'm not claiming them.

What you get

• 7 movement modes and their entry transitions

• The Foot Placement (Mover) and Foothold Pose anim nodes

• The GASP setup tool, a foot placement node swapper and an animation set builder

• A ladder actor and component

• A demo course with a labelled section for every move (type Foothold.SpawnDemo in the console), and a ready-made pawn

• All C++, exposed to Blueprint, and covered by 129 automated tests

• A full manual: gregorigin.com/Manuals/Foothold

Before you buy

• UE 5.8 only. Mover is still Experimental, and Epic changes its API between versions. I'll keep up with it, but I can't promise anything about engine versions that don't exist yet.

• No animation clips are included (see above).

• For now, you can't get onto a ladder from the top, and a wall-run can't hand over straight to a ledge hang. You can still grab the ledge as you fall.

• For now, the slide keeps the capsule at full height, so it won't take you under low obstacles.

• Available for Windows, Linux, Android. Unavailable for Mac and iOS.

Questions before you buy? Ask me on Discord: https://discord.gg/nqYQ5mtmHb or on the Fab forum.