Talk:Strafing (video games)

Untitled

 * Note: The discussions on this page were cut-and-paste moved from the talk pages of the two merged articles above

i dont understand this article i graduated magna cum in engineering so i know math seems to be overcomplicating the math in order to confuse the average user ill read over it again...
 * ok i got it now, the picture threw me off, it does not correspond to the text, but is an example on the same topic. a little strange...

I agree that a drawing of 2 adjacent sides of a square with their corresponding diagonal would be less confusing as it pertains to the example.

Rename to Strafe running
Currently Strafe running redirects to Straferunning. I think the redirects should be the other way around. If you check with google Strafe running is the much more common form of the term. -- Mdmkolbe (talk) 05:27, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Strafe-running would be better. I think all the compund terms in this series should be hyphenated. SharkD (talk) 05:56, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Well we should probably use what ever is the most common term. That having been said, a search for "strafe running" (which also gets the hyphenated forms) seems to show a 50/50 split between "strafe running" and "strafe-running".  So I'm neutral on which to use, but which ever is not selected should probably also be a redirect.  (Gah! Too many redirects :-)) --Mdmkolbe (talk) 14:47, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Math?
OK, I'm not an expert on Gaming or Math, but I am very suspicious of the math in this article - it looks well dodgy to me. I've a feeling it's a hoax. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you cut across a diagonal, you'll get there quicker - simple pythagoras theorem, not all this dubious looking stuff. I'm considering having some input from WikiProject Math ... Camillus (talk) 00:02, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Forget Pythagoras', it's nursery-level shapes, or vectors at a push. I've wiped the material in question, in response to your thread raised at WT:WikiProject Maths, but by association, also your comment above. Thanks for raising this matter; in the interests of receiving wider input, I suggest keeping all further discussion at the relevant thread at the WikiProject Maths talk page. Regards, Anthøny  00:32, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Trackball
Despite the advantages it may have, is the trackball really the "preferred pointing device" of "many gamers"? To my knowledge, the mouse is far more common.


 * I said many, not most. But I think I will change it to "some" to make you happy. —RadRafe 30 June 2005 15:25 (UTC)


 * not agree with radrafe, during 12 years of video game playing, LAN/friends/cybercafé, I have seen only one trackball. Even if it may be "the best pointing device ever created", nearly none of players use it, because it's more difficult to learn how to use it, seems more fragile, and is much more expensive than a "normal" pointing device like a mouse. 90.60.94.92 (talk) 01:27, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Use of "she"
I guess they were trying to be "politically correct."

more like politically STUPID — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.82.177.150 (talk) 12:35, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Now now, as funny as that was, wiki has rules Judicier (talk) 04:06, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

She? Her? What!?
Uh, sorry if this is some sort of thing from the english language, but why this article suddenly starts to call the target as "she"? &mdash; Kieff | Talk 07:54, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)

Diagram suggestions
Would it be possible to replace the X in the diagram's centre with a figure of an opponent? This would make it clearer that the maneuver is intended to keep shooting that opponent while making it difficult to be shot in return. If the opponent figure were facing roughly right, it would make them look particularly unfortunate by the end of their attacker's arc. I don't know how it would look, but perhaps the addition of bullets from both guns would also clarify matters, again showing the strafee's disadvantage. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:27, 17 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Like this, or this maybe? I'm not sure about bullets, though. Fredrik 19:40, 17 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Yes, both are much clearer (I think I marginally prefer the one with more fading, but they're both great). I botched a nasty version with bullets, which it think is a bit clearer .  It would be better if the bullets were arrows (my photoshop skills are too poor for that). -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 20:09, 17 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Another try. Fredrik 20:42, 17 May 2004 (UTC)


 * That's perfect. Now it really captures how victimised the poor guy in the middle is. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 20:56, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Is it really useful?
> Circlestrafing is most useful in close-quarters combat I think circlestrafing is only useful against newbies or monsters in singleplayer game. you can't harass using it even a keyboarder if he had tweaked config.sys or somewhat experienced, at least in Quake series.

Real life?
Is it video-game only ? Can't be used in real combat ? Ericd 12:14, 18 May 2004 (UTC)


 * You'd have to be insanely fast to circle around someone so fast that they can't follow you. Fredrik 12:25, 18 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Running on your feet it seems pretty difficult but in mechanised warfare ?
 * Ericd 12:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)


 * I suppose tanks could end up circling one another, blasting away with their guns. But doing so would expose the tracked side of the tank, its most vulnerable facet, to the enemy.  Anyway, I think tanks rarely close to such close quarters that the circling action would be significant. I doubt it happens now, with computer-aimed guns that can kill at a range of thousands of feet, but perhaps it happened in WW2 when tank guns were entirely manual and you had to be fairly close to hit anything smaller than the proverbial barn door. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 12:56, 18 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Aye, that was the case in WWII as turret traverse speed was a travesty, but if you're going to engage in mechanized warfare, you're more than likely going to add computer-assisted tracking so circling is useless in that sense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Judicier (talk • contribs) 04:09, 3 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Yeah, you'd need to have much less inertia. I suppose one could characterise combat between small (and thus high power-to-inertia ratio) animals as melee circlestrafing; I'm pretty sure scorpions dance around one another, each trying to flank his opponent and sting him in an unprotected hindpart. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 12:50, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Inhuman?
"Many bots are programmed to employ circlestrafing, and inhumanly rapid and fluid circlestrafing is one telltale sign that a player is in fact either a bot or an aimbot-assisted human."

Doesn't the usage of the word "inhumanly" denote that the player is not acting by mere human agency? Then how can that be "one telltale sign"? --sol 17:54, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Original Research
This article survived the AfD, despite Wikipedia's policies against original research and unverified material. The article has only a single reference, and does not provide any verifiability for any of the claims in the article. The material should be deleted if it is not referenced -- and soon, as it has had more than eighteen months to collect references. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:11, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * With no improvement to the provided references, I've removed the unreferenced material from this article. -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:35, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I've again removed this material. -- Mikeblas (talk) 15:35, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Do we really need two diagrams?
The animation is just an animated version of the first diagram; do we really need both? I suggest adding the first image's description to the animation and just having that. Machine758 (talk) 19:30, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Technique missing from this article
Limited straferunning is also possible due to a glitch in Half-Life 1 (including mods such as Counter-strike), and also in any Source engine first-person game (including Half-Life 2, Counter-strike source, Left 4 Dead 1,2, and crucially Portal 1,2). If the player runs forward parallel to a wall while also strafing into that wall, it again increases forward speed by a factor of up to sqrt(2) when the player is facing exactly parallel. The significance in Portal is that there exists a range of gaps which would normally require portals to cross, but where wall-strafing would let the player directly jump the gap, allowing those portals to be used elsewhere (a common theme in its problem-solving). I believe this glitch dates back to Quake 1, upon which Half-Life 1 was built. I can't find any source material (other than if I made a video demonstrating it), and even with a source, I also have no idea how to go about adding it in a way that meets Wikipedia standards. Teh leet haxor (talk) 11:51, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Etymology
Does anyone know this movement came to be known as "strafing"? Its always puzzled me that a term that refers to a form of shooting at stuff was adopted by games about shooting stuff to mean somthing other than shooting stuff. Iapetus (talk) 21:08, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah. I came to this article hoping for that. 2405:204:952D:F334:DD63:5F6F:DEA2:492F (talk) 20:25, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:First-person (gaming) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 19:01, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Merge with Strafe-jumping
I'm not sure we need two pages that basically discuss the same thing. This article already discusses "straferunning", so I see no reason for it to not be able to host "strafe-jumping", too.  Anarchyte ( work  &#124;  talk )  08:16, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Be bold! Especially when the article in question is unsourced. (not watching, please )  czar  13:57, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Merge the hell out of this. Clearly about the same subject.  Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 14:32, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Merge, Merge, Merge. This should be pretty uncontroversial and straight forward. Harizotoh9 (talk) 02:05, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
 * As this has been over a month, I've gone ahead and done a Full content paste merge/  Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 10:08, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

RE: Strafe Jumping "Implemented in the following games/mods" (or rather more accurately, "is possible in the following games/mods")
I recommend changing this to either an expandable list or we remove it entirely as it looks too definitive. I can possibly expand this and add enough information to make this its own page but eh.

Currently listed games/mods are actually very limited, for example there are games where it can be abused the heck out of like uberstrike *cough cough*, Quake and derrivative mod remakes like Reflex Arena, as well as others out there that do have partial work-arounds for this problem but also purposely left the code intact for the sake of keeping it as an element of the gameplay such as Tremulous (Humans have limited jump stamina while humans get to make the most out of the game physics to manoeuvre bypassing their largely melee limited offensive capability), Urban Terror (like counter-strike, but with an emphasis on parkour) and games rather well known such as Counter-Strike (which everybody complains that it requires skill to do, which it does, but in my opinion is very much largely probability based to core multiple frame perfect jumps). Then, there are games that feature partially broken code that resembles quake air physics code but not perfectly to reduce the skill ceiling, such as Natural Selection 2.

By this if we ever do make a list for the games, we can split them up into table categorisation by limitations, with headers for comments on things such as:

air physics similarity to original quake or quake 2/3 code (e.g. Portal 2 has a two-step system where its air speed limit and accelerations are Q3-like below the ground speed limit and Q1-like up to 1200-ish inches/second, NS2 uses a combination of Quake 2/3 style with broken air control physics similar to Unreal Tournament physics but limited, Xonotic in public gameplay [race mode uses simple Q3 CPMA] also takes a similar approach but is more complete),

ground physics similarity (e.g. TF2 has a hard speed limit which upon touching the ground your planar velocity is set, all source engine games after goldsrc have their own custom friction curves),

and other limitations imposed (e.g. the effect of CS halving(verify?) the velocity difference every frame above the speed limit when touching the ground, stamina effects in urban terror, call of duty and many source engine games)

I'm able to provide the basic math for this but I don't know much about wiki math symbols and stuff. An old website called funender used to have the maths equations laid out in a graphical format but last time I checked it was down.

ZdrytchX (talk) 17:58, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Strafe-jumping edits summary (rev. 955275540, 6 May 2020)
I made the following changes to the strafe-jumping section in my rewrite/edit (the edit summary field didn't have enough space): ...In case someone wanted a summary. 80.220.64.145 (talk) 22:35, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Write strafe-jumping with hyphen for consistency
 * Added contextual info about game engines where it matters
 * A more precise explanation for the calculation bug, also more true to the source material
 * Rewrote the descriptions for strafe-jumping and circle jumping methods for better clarity and accuracy
 * Removed vaguely presented technical details about bunny hopping in Source
 * Moved sentences around to put them in better contexts
 * Removed bad sources where a better one was available
 * Removed some unsuitable and marginal games from bunny hopping examples (there are more than enough already)
 * All subheadings on same level (bunny hopping could belong to a separate section/article...)
 * Just different wording for better grammar and more clarity

Wiki Education assignment: Introduction to Digital Humanities
— Assignment last updated by Perception Check Failed (talk) 03:40, 27 October 2023 (UTC)