Halogene's Newbie Corner - Part 1: Bunny Hopping

Note: this is a guest post by Halogene

Hello everyone that's new to Xonotic and maybe even new to fast-paced first person shooters in general! In this very first chapter of my newbie tips I'll be showing you an important movement technique called “bunny hopping.“

You may have noticed that players race around the maps at insane speeds, making them hard to hit and also hard to tell from which direction they'll come next, should you survive an attack. You can do that too, and this post will tell you how.

In Xonotic you have a lot of movement control while you are in the air, and to a great extent you'll accelerate when pressing the forward button while flying. When you just walk around, though, your feet are in constant contact with the ground, so the friction is slowing you down a lot. One of the keys to gain high speeds in Xonotic is therefore to touch the ground as little as possible. By constantly jumping you can keep ground contact to a minimum. The good thing is that you only need to keep the jump button pressed and you will jump again once you hit the ground (unless of course you disabled that in Settings → User). If you press the forward button while holding the jump button, you'll continuously get faster until you hit the acceleration limit.

This is quite easy and there's nothing really to master about plain forward bunny hopping. You'll face complications if you now try to turn once you gained some speed, however. If you continue to press the forward key and simply turn the mouse, you'll hardly manage to make a sharp turn (unless you stop jumping, which slows you down a lot). Online you'll meet a lot of players doing sharp turns at high speeds, and here's the secret how to do it:

Before the turn, while still bunny hopping, release the forward key (yes, really release it - it doesn't slow you down that much). Once you've released the forward key and while still keeping the jump key pressed, hold down the strafe key in the direction you want to turn (for sharp right turn: strafe right). Now hold the jump key and the strafe key and smoothly turn your mouse in the strafe direction (in my example, right). It's vital to move the mouse smoothly, because any abrupt sudden movements will slow you down. I can't stress this aspect enough - a lot of newcomers that I told this technique basically got all the key pressing part right but fail at moving the mouse smoothly. Slowly accelerate and decelerate the mouse turn and maintain a steady turn speed in between. The movement needs to be fluent and soft to get the full benefit. Also note that releasing the forward key while you've already pressed the strafe key will slow you down too, so be sure to use the right order. You'll notice that if you do it right, you actually don't lose speed in turns, but rather start to accelerate!

Once you're done turning, you can release the strafe key and press forward key again or even directly switch to the other direction. A good way to practice this is to use forward only for inital acceleration, and then to do turns left and right running in an number eight-shaped figure (I recommend the main room in the map “afterslime” for that).

It takes a while to get used to, but if you practice it it goes into your cerebellum sooner or later (depending on your age, mostly) and then you'll never think about it again! At that point you'll be bunny hopping all over the place at high speed. Mastering this technique is very rewarding, since running around a map at high speed is a bunch of fun.

That's it for now, practice and enjoy!

now we just need to get antibody to read this and we can have a new movement tutorial

YES! COOL IDEA!

First of all I think it's a great effort to teach newbies and Halogene is the master of that
But to be honest I don't think long texts without any media is the best thing to do this. A simple youtube video would probably reach way more people and at the same time advertise Xonotic by showing off its neat movement system.

"YES! COOL IDEA!" allready meant:

I totally agree with you, guys. And I think it would be extremly superb to have a video with insane graphics and chooksta's music (t) and soft voice of Antibody reading what Halogene so helpfully prepared for the begginners.

That is what I meant.

But to be honest I don't think long texts without any media is the best thing to do this. A simple youtube video would probably reach way more people and at the same time advertise Xonotic by showing off its neat movement system.

I totally agree. I'm working on adding pictures at least to the next issue (which will cover laser jumping and wall lasering). With pictures it looks much more alive. It's coming along nicely, and will look more professional and appealing, promised.

But I'm also working on a screenplay for a newbie tutorial video. I just have absolutely no video editing skills, so far I'm only writing down what the video scene should cover, how long it should be and some text to be read out to it. I have a lot of ideas as to how it should/could look and how to structure it so it's entertaining, advertising and teaching at the same time.

Is there a possibility anyone would like to produce video scenes and do the video editing? I'd be happy to collaborate...

I totally agree. I'm working on adding pictures at least to the next issue (which will cover laser jumping and wall lasering). With pictures it looks much more alive. It's coming along nicely, and will look more professional and appealing, promised.

I'd wait untill Samual FINALLY finishes his weapons balance, as the laser will be a bit different than what is now. It wouldn't be a good thing to redo the whole video, just because stuff changed.
That's the main reason I never continued the weapon tutorial videos.

Well the movement will not be affected, I believe (it better not be!). The laser jumping and wall lasering part of the blog post is almost finished, and I hope the laser primary will NOT be changed by Samual. So at least the blog post tutorial will continue as is, no use stopping all work for newbies just because things might change in the future. They will, always. :o)

For the video, I agree, it should reflect the changes to be implemented as the video is FAR more work.

I could make some (no laser) movement demos, and capture them in ultra graphics if you want. Just first explain something in a wall of text, then show the videos.

Well the demo scenes are not the problem, the video editing is, rather. Well maybe if someone can explain how to do slow camera flights and projectile following the I could do the video snippets, arranging should be doable, too. It mostly depends on camera flights, I guess...

heh. thx for that. i never got through turns xD

Code:

Demo movement by Justin
say ^2 YO! Press "O" to record in normal motion/ press "n" to record in slow motion/ Press "p" to stop demo and recording/ Press "m",",","." to play demo in diffrent speed. ^1enjoy

cl_capturevideo_fps 100
camera_speed_attenuation 35

bind o "cl_capturevideo 1; slowmo 1"
bind n "cl_capturevideo 1; slowmo 0.5"
bind i "cl_capturevideo 1; slowmo 0.05"
bind p "cl_capturevideo 0; slowmo 0"

bind m "cl_capturevideo 0; slowmo 1"
bind , "cl_capturevideo 0; slowmo 5"
bind . "cl_capturevideo 0; slowmo 20"

bind j +roll_right
bind h +roll_left

bind v "r_letterbox 1; crosshair 0"
bind b "r_letterbox 0; crosshair 1"

ALSO: 'j' and 'h' rotates camera (clock wise or ... the other)
'v' switches off interface, 'b' switches it on again.
There are few other quite important things, but currently I can't for the life of me remember what were them. Ask Kojn/ZeroQL.


Ahhhh. those days of movie making.... so cool....

Cheers for sharing that Justin. Good luck with a video/picture tutorial guys.

I can take a stab at doing a recording w/ mic live if you all think that would help. It would be rather informal, but still useful.

Yo, wait for a next part of lessons for newbs, and i hope it will be hints for aim training in xonotic, and other shooting isues for each weapon (especialy RL, GL and electro).
P.S. is there any map for aim training?

P.S. is there any map for aim training?

in the nexuiz days there was one. A big room with low gravity and with minsta mode. Dunno what happened to it.

alternatively play against draelor not with him =)