The early versions of counter-strike had a famous bunny-hopping bug where you could cover 40% more ground than simply walking (jumping had a bug where the X and Y coordinates were individually calculated, so if you moved in both directions at the same time you would cover sqrt(2) ground)
It was a skill honed and part of the fun of the game. Then in version 1.3 they removed it because it was a 'bug' -- they basically removed the mini-game of bunny-hopping and the first 30 seconds that were all about perfectly executing bunny hops to get into position were replaced by a monotonous boring walk.
Such a shame that the monotony of real-life is added to games.
Anyways, I think the author should try Overwatch -- it's one of the few contemporary widely played FPSs that doesn't take realism too seriously.
On the opposite spectrum of simple exploits by jumping, we have Tribes. In the original game, people quickly realized you can exploit the physics engine by jumping, allowing you to quickly traverse the terrain. It became known as "skiing".
The devs, rather than patching it, incorporated skiing into Tribes 2 and has been a staple ever since. And also, while Counter Strike has become a massive success and has thousands of players today. Tribes (while it was successful at the time) has become a niche game that quickly weeds out newcomers and hardly anyone plays it anymore.
Not saying that there's a correlation, I just find it amusing.
It's just a bummer that Tribes: Ascend (the last installment of Tribes) went downhill quickly and became dead. No other FPS game can match the sheer joy of shooting other players with projectile weapons while skiing midair at 200km/h...
Tribes: Ascend was really good. It was a labor of love for the developers who worked on it.
Sadly, it was abandoned and taken over by cheaters. Also, it was never as moddable as the original Tribes was, and since there were no private servers, there was no way for the community to pick up the slack after Hi Rez abandoned it.
Learning to ski well in Tribes was one of the most satisfying things to learn in an FPS back in the day.
If you knew how to really ski well, and had the map mastery to apply it well, it almost felt like cheating sometimes because new players had almost no hope of keeping up.
I'm sure in today's world it would get patched out.
I clocked in over a thousand hours in warframe. I can only imagine that the video talks about coptering. Honestly coptering removal is one of the reasons I left. It just took joy out of the game.
This is a soapbox that I really enjoy standing on. I think there is a large number of game developers who have forgotten that the point of a game is to be fun.
There is room in the world for hyper-realistic real-time raytracing games. But not a lot of room.
To any game developers reading this, my request to you is to please optimize for fun, especially at the expense of polish.
Fun is different things to different people. It’s common for many gamers to believe that fun for them is fun for everyone, but balancing fun for multiple parties in a multiplayer game, where losing has to be fun, too, involves a lot of tradeoffs. Inevitably, there will be some mechanic or feature that works against the long-term health of the game, despite being fun for some, and it’s either the game or the mechanic. One of them has to go.
A good designer, though, should also be examining why that mechanic was fun, and how the same dynamics that led to it can be recreated in a way that’s fun for both the player and their opponent. Or even a different game built on different assumptions where those dynamics are accepted.
There’s often a lot more that goes into removing something like bunny hopping than just a desire for polish. To any player out there angry at the removal of their favorite mechanic, my request is to consider the whole game and the enjoyment of all the people who play it, even at the expense of the thing that’s fun for you.
It should be noted that there are multiple mechanics at play here, and neither was removed completely.
The first mechanic is that while jumping, when you either hold down the A-button and move your mouse left at the right pace, or hold down the D-button and move your mouse right at the right pace, you will accelerate slightly, plus change your trajectory.
The second mechanic is that you don't just stop when you hit the ground, instead friction is applied to you in a very simplistic way. Also, when you jump at exactly the same tick at which you hit the ground, this friction won't even be applied.
Both mechanics together mean that you can reach theoretically unlimited velocity.
I'm not entirely sure what the changes in 1.3 were, but certainly both mechanics still exist in 1.6.
The first mechanic you can easily test on a local server, by typing "sv_gravity 0" into the console, then jumping into the air and performing the motions mentioned above - you can still reach unlimited speed.
The second mechanic is harder to test, but I'm pretty sure it still works. However, it might only work for a single time or something like that.
There is also "sv_airaccelerate" which somehow controls how much you accelerate with mechanic 1, but I'm not exactly sure how it works.
One thing though that I always mention when this comes up: Mechanic 1 doesn't just make gameplay better, it actually makes it more realistic too, and it should be implement in every shooter. "But I can't jump around corners in real life!" you might say, however I would argue that you actually can. We can do this because we can use both of our feet to manipulate our trajectory much more finely that we can in most games.
All mechanic one does is give us this lost freedom of motion back.
"We can do this because we can use both of our feet to manipulate our trajectory much more finely that we can in most games."
This is another thing that I think game designers often forget. When trying for a "realistic" game, you have to account for the fact that in the real world we have a lot more "bandwidth" than our computer monitors, sound, and input devices can offer. It is perfectly fine for a "realistic" game to offer some counterbalancing capabilities to address the unrealistic constraints of the game space. A HUD being a classic example that is generally included; it's a cute idea to try to build a game that doesn't need one, but they've mostly been disasters (couple of exceptions), because a HUD is one of those compensations.
Another example: I may not have a minimap in real life, but I do have proprioception, balance input as provided by my inner ears, a nearly 180 degree FOV (albeit with a lot of details and caveats, but I've got decades of experience dealing with those; my eyes saccade much more quickly and accurately than my mouselook even after quite of time working on the latter), tactile connections to the space even down to something as simple as feeling my feet hit the ground and the physical effort of walking. Staying oriented in real space is massively harder if we take those away (see also "people getting disoriented in zero gravity"). It's perfectly fine to have a minimap help me out.
Being able to fudge a trajectory a bit fits right in to that idea. In real life I've got all sorts of extra inputs to help me jump accurately, and years of experience in my body to help me know the likely consequences. Even a realistic game can afford to help me out a bit as I remote-control around the feelingless, proprioceptionless, tunnel-visioned, aurally-challenged, and so on robot that constitutes my player.
I don’t know if you played CS at the time, but there wasn’t a single soul who didn’t enjoy bunny hopping or had mastering it as a goal
Besides the standard bomb maps, and the fun game dynamics created by this “bug”, there were hundreds of servers running surf_ maps and others that relied on hopping mechanics. The update threw a massive community in a tar pit.
> I don’t know if you played CS at the time, but there wasn’t a single soul who didn’t enjoy bunny hopping
Loads game
Sees people hopping like preschoolers
"No thanks. I'm good. "
A bit of a self fulfilling statement there. I understand and appreciate that others found it fun, but such mechanics have always reduced my enjoyment, and I tend to avoid such games. Nothing wrong with either side of that, but one cant then claim the unanimity of enjoyment as meaningful.
I don't expect ANY game where "run" and "jump" are options to make "jump" the primary form of movement.
I get that "realism" is a silly thing to discuss, not because it's good/bad, but because it is meaningless to try and distinguish the "changes from real life we like/want" from "changes from real life that hurt our enjoyment", particularly when we all have different tastes.
But all games that make gummy bear-style hopping over flat, unbroken land a common form of movement are personally visually jarring, and even as I welcome others to enjoy whatever games they want, I don't think my reaction is a terribly crazy reaction to have.
...Fortunately I'll likely die long before common human inhabitation of the moon, so I won't have to a reality I find jarring in this way :)
(real life is jarring enough already. Too much realism)
By that measure, Doom is a terrible game. No hopping, but people don’t move at 50km/h. It’s all about pleasurable game dynamics and realism plays an incredibly small role there.
I feel like we're in a renaissance (or maybe modernism) of fun in video games.
In the early days of the medium, there were a lot of hard constraints with regard to computing power, so game designers had to work with what they had to produce fun in efficient and creative ways. In other words, space invaders or super mario had no chance of achieving anything approaching realism given the hardware available at the time, so they had to focus on maximizing fun instead.
Later, beginning with Doom and expanding with the rise of 3D acceleration, we were wowed by the prospect of exploring 3D worlds in a way that felt familiar to navigating the real world, which gave rise to this implicit idea that achieving realism should be the goal of video games.
I remember discussing video games like this as a teenager: when FPS games introduced reloading as a mechanic, or when Half-Life got rid of floating weapons and health kits in favor of objects which lay there on the ground diagetically like they would in real life, or when Halo only let us hold two weapons at the same time, we talked about these developments in the terms that they were obviously steps forward, because they were more realistic. Often the "best graphics" are also conflated with those which are the most photo-realistic.
But more recently, we've started to round a corner where people have started to look back, and realize that realism isn't necessarily the goal of games, and is often orthogonal to fun or other redeeming qualities. After all there are a lot of parts of real life which are not actually fun, and if we simulate the violent setting of many video games with perfect realism, it probably would not be very fun to experience bleeding out from a bullet wound in an accurate way. More recently, games have gotten a bit more fantasy back in, and are more unapologetic about revealing their medium.
I think it's similar in some ways to what we saw in European art movements. For hundreds of years, people tried to paint reality with ever increasing fidelity. But sometime in the classical period, the problem of how to represent light, shadow and geometry in accurate perspective in paint became a solved problem, and thus it was no longer interesting. Later movements, like impressionism and later modernism and post-modernism threw realism aside and focused on pushing the medium itself forward in whatever way ended up being the most compelling.
Someways games have become so streamlined as to remove all fun from it, Witcher 3 for example has a detailed world, but the game is essentially that of going from one marker to another in the mini-map, in other words while playing one is essentially ignoring the beautiful world and instead fulfilling tedious chores. Many recent Ubisoft titles have been similarly critized for being essentially descending into a rote task of clearing markers on the map.
The amazing community of TF2 is unmatched by Overwatch. From nope.avi to DWL1993's various remixes, they were an integral part of internet meme culture of the late 2000's and early 2010's.
TF2 has also accumulated a decent amount of design cruft -- I'm not a fan of the cosmetics added post-release that alter the silhouettes of the classes, plus the alternate weapons dramatically change how some classes play/must be played against.
OWL and OW itself is still going strong albeit “faded” as you’ve stated. But I’d put Rust in that bucket as well PUBG Is circling around the drain as well. Apex is still doing very well ofc.
Escape from Tarkov is the new trending game and the market leaders are still Fortnite CSGO and League.
It was a quake engine bug, which followed into GoldSrc, the engine developed for Half-Life, and thus Counter-Strike.
Quake-like games embraced bunny-hopping because I guess they were already pretty "unrealistic" whilst Counter-Strikes entire schtick was about the "realism" that it brought to the scene.
And bunny-hopping wasn't removed until 1.4, where they added a movement penalty every time you jump. It was softened in 1.5 after a lot of discord from the player base.
This “realism” argument is not convincing. Quake is an arena shooter. It’s core mechanics are around moving quickly. If there’s a bug that aids that then leave it. CS is about strategic positioning, managing economy, and teamwork. Having a bug that gives an advantage to movement, which isn’t something people play CS for, is not fun.
Ah cool to see another old school game which likes Overwatch. My FPS shooter experience has really been dominated by Doom 2 and Unreal Tournament. Then there was a major break and some Halo playing which I also kind of enjoyed.
But when it comes to keeping things simple and enjoyable Overwatch really brought things back for me. For somebody who does not have time to invest tons of time into gaming and don't really care anymore, I love that in Overwatch there is no messing around with picking up weapons. Just learn the weapons your character comes with.
The cartoony look of overwatch makes the worlds a lot easier to navigate. Too much realism makes it hard to pick out enemies, objectives etc.
Also too realistic weapons, limits the variety of strategies one can employ.
I care more about internal consistency than absolute realism. Fortnite does not do it for me. You got these sort of realistic weapons but then then people can build walls hand houses in record time, in the middle of a fight. It just seems really dumb.
Although this seems acceptable to me in Minecraft, but against I guess it is the internal consistency. The graphics and everything in Minecraft suggests there is nothing odd about building a wall in the middle of a fight.
I was very much a part of this community at the time and engaged in a lot of discussions around this "feature". Part of the issue is that there were degrees of bunny hopping (as in being able to do it extremely well and consistently) and script assisted bunny hops were also becoming a thing. This was also around the advent of aimbotting finally reaching the half-life engine and there was a real discussion about turning new players away from the game because of these "pro features".
Ultimately it wasn't part of the intended game design, despite being a bit of a fun imaginary minigame within the greater 5v5, and I agree it was the best choice for all the mods around that time (CS wasn't the only one you could bhop in).
To add to this anecdote though, knife scraping on a wall when the round is down to 1v1 was almost always universally "come knife fight me" and for the many times I've seen players arrange this duel I rarely see either try to "cheat" and shoot the other.
Later, Battlefield 2142 had you spawn in via drop pods which you had extremely limited control over so you could try to land behind cover, it was discovered if you rapidly moved the mouse you could move farther. If you had a mouse that you could change the DPI on the fly you could crank it and actually travel across an entire map. Enter the pod surfing advantage.
With some skill you could basically land wherever you wanted to within feet, dropping behind enemy lines gave you an insane advantage. You could actually drop at the very back of an enemy controlled area, behind their most distant respawn and just waste the other team.
You could also use pod surfing to reach elevated positions that you could not get to otherwise. You could just sit in your sniper perch laying waste to unsuspecting people below. Better you could get up there, then have a teammate land as resupply or as a medic and effectively stay there the rest of the map dealing death. The clan I played with was very good at pod surfing, any time a guy would get in one of those positions I'd steer over to them and drop health or resupply depending on what they needed and then I'd just suicide and respawn elsewhere until they needed resupply again and I'd kamikaze and head surf back to them. Sometimes we'd organize sessions with another clan that was similarly adept at pod surfing and we'd either go play on their server or they'd come to ours and stuff would get ridiculous. Poor unsuspecting randoms would join the server and be like 'what the hell is even going on?!'. I think of all the FPS I've played, BF 2142 was probably the bulk of my most memorable FPS experiences, thanks entirely to that bug. I joined that clan because they saw me pod surfing on their server and extended an invite. I played with them for 3 BF games total before we all sorta went our own ways.
Fairly quickly servers with active mods would ban you for it and eventually they implemented something to seriously nerf pod surfing but man, it was fun while it lasted.
This was a mechanic that was in the original Half Life games, it comes from GoldSrc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldSrc), the original Half Life engine, being a heavily modified Quake World engine. It's funny you mention Overwatch, because many of the old Quake players are now playing Overwatch competitively. In Quake this kind of movement is a part of the gameplay, but for Counter Strike, many of the maps were not designed with the intention of this kind of movement being used. The result was people were able to do things like get into the skybox. Even though you can't bunny hop in Counter Strike like you could back then, there are still movement tricks, and maps specifically made for practicing movement. At the time there was also TFC, which was more willing to sacrifice 'realism' for game play, but Team Fortress had also existed previously for Quake World as well. All of that said, right now the most played game is Fortnite, and it definitely does not put realism first.
Oh, how we worked on our quake jumping skills, trying to get from the long passage over to a hill on the other side of some water. Q2DM1: The Edge.
We also played a lot of actionquake later. We made maps especially for jumping with this technique but I can't remember ever calling it bunnyjumping.
Funny, yesterday my daughter found how to move faster in some game by pressing strafe and forward at the same time. Had some fun to explain how that works with math in programming :-)
You might of heard the term 'strafe jumping' used in place of 'bunny jumping', they are actually different things, but depending on the game you played the term might of been used interchangeably.
"The main difference between the two is that Bunny Hopping requires the player to release the forward movement key immediately upon strafing."
In other words, if you were playing Q1/Quake World, to gain speed, you would jump and only press left and right. To keep going straight you would flick your mouse in the opposite direction that you were pressing on the keyboard. Although there are a bunch of other small tricks. In Quake 3 you would be required to press forward and left/right, unless you were playing something like CPMA. You also had more air control in something like Q1/Quake World.
It is pretty interesting from a gaming and programming perspective :). Also, not about mechanics, but Q2 CTF was really fun at the time :D
As a die hard Quakeworld fan, the relatively boring movement physics of CS was one of the things that put me off.
I'm not mentioning this to be a jerk, just that I totally understand how the movement can make someone addicted to a game.
Side note, when id software handed off maintenance of Quake 2 to Threewave, Zoid added full air control ala QW to Q2. Suddenly I loved the game. Alas, Q2ers almost rioted and it was changed back.
I organize LAN for my friend group (from 10 to 16 people). We play mostly CS:GO and UT2004. We tried Xonotic but it didn't catch on. Sometimes we play OverWatch, but the 6 players limit hurt. Also Aoe2 and War3 when we are in a RTS mood. I would love to find a fun car game (something in the vein of Burnout 3). I tried to introduce SuperTuxCard, but my picky friends didn't like it. We are not into moba, nor battle royal game. Any recommendations worth looking?
Urban terror is an extremely fun shooter. Imo, an action game's goal is to make you feel cool, and almost never have I felt as cool as when I'm double-tapping helmeted players from across the map with the 92g. Of course that was a decade ago now, they've sort of shot themselves in the foot by promising a new experience (Urban Terror HD) and delivering very little since.
Bunny hopping is still there in CS:GO, just harder to hit multiple jumps. And, in reference to the thread, CS:GO is the best shooter you can play in 2020. :)
And if you really like bunny hopping, there's also the dedicated maps/servers to it. Although they seem to be more popular on CS:S than on CS:GO last time I played. (Few years back)
A vast majority of hero balance often came down to limitations of the WC3 engine, that were carried on into Source2 because they had now become hero defining traits.
Where did you get the idea that it was removed since 1.3? bhopping was the main thing I found enjoyable to do and I’ve only played 1.5+. Definitely I was there until 1.6 which is the latest version.
Pre-CS1.3 bunnyhopping worked the same as Quake. People soon figured out CS-style bunnyhopping, and it’s hard enough that Valve didn’t bother nerfing it again
> The early versions of counter-strike had a famous bunny-hopping bug where you could cover 40% more ground than simply walking (jumping had a bug where the X and Y coordinates were individually calculated, so if you moved in both directions at the same time you would cover sqrt(2) ground)
Another such bug (though probably from a different FPS) is rocket jumps - which made it into a live-action TV show, The Librarians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_wvUP6R20A
I hate to say it but bunny-hopping exploits still exists in CS - although in a less extreme form. Super hard to do manually now so many people that do it are using scripts to accomplish the same feats.
I was heavily into CS starting in 1999. The mad dash at the beginning was fun to some players but being forced to bunny hop to be competitive got old really fast.
It was a skill honed and part of the fun of the game. Then in version 1.3 they removed it because it was a 'bug' -- they basically removed the mini-game of bunny-hopping and the first 30 seconds that were all about perfectly executing bunny hops to get into position were replaced by a monotonous boring walk.
Such a shame that the monotony of real-life is added to games.
Anyways, I think the author should try Overwatch -- it's one of the few contemporary widely played FPSs that doesn't take realism too seriously.