There are a couple of techniques involved that allow you to accelerate and move fast (though it's not skiing
).
- Holding down the forward key and the jump key is a technique called bunny hopping. Of course you gain a little more speed if you hop onto surfaces that are downhill in movement direction (just as you loose speed if you hit surfaces going uphill) - so look out for sloped surfaces you can use for acceleration.
You can gain a little extra out of the acceleration if you perform strafe jumping. How that works is explained in Hero's strafe jumping lesson.
If you have gained some speed and want to do sharper turns you'll need to release forward key and press the strafe key in turn direction while smoothly turning the mouse. More elaborate explanation here (apologies for non-existant illustration, it was the first of a series).
- To initially gain speed out of the stand you can use several techniques:
- Without using a weapon, you can gain a tad more speed by doing a circle jump before your first bunny hop. A circle jump makes use of the fact that if you hold down forward and a strafe key and turn the mouse quickly and steadily so you do a 90 degree or even 180 degree turn without (!) jumping, you can reach a moderately higher ground speed which will result in a faster bunny hop start. A short explanation of the circle jump technique is included in the strafe jumping lesson. Experienced players start a bunny hop by automatism with a swift and effective turn of the mouse, applying the extra speed from the circle jump technique.
- You can also use weapons to accelerate. For horizontal acceleration, you can use the laser to propel yourself off a nearby wall as seen in the wall lasering tutorial. If you happen to hold the crylink, you can also start a bunny hop by shooting crylink secondary at the floor in front of you, approximately in an angle of 30 to 40 degrees. The crylink's negative push force will pull you forward with a quite impressive force. And then if you don't care about getting hurt a LOT you can also use the rocket launcher either by shooting a wall behind you or by shooting behind you and immediately detonating the rocket just as if you would rocket fly (see the rocket launcher explanation in the core weapons description.
I hope this helps to understand how they do it? This essentially sums up all relevant movement tricks for horizontal acceleration that I'm aware of at the moment. If you now think "GOSH THIS GAME IS SO COMPLICATED", don't despair, the basics of these techniques are actually quite easy to learn once you know about them, and if you practice them one by one and try to apply them in-game, you'll do them automatically sooner than you might think. Once you master movement in Xonotic, it becomes a very satisfying experience to race around like a nuclear ninja jackrabbit on speed while shooting people on the fly.
