Bunny hopping
Posted by Rainbow on 27/10/2002.You may know me better as Joop who does the Joop Jump, which is commonly referred to as bunny hopping. Bunny hopping can get you where you want to go quicker but make a Scout of a HWGuy it certainly doesn't. There's no reason why you can't over take those Scouts down the straights though.
People often mistake bunny hoppers as people using a timescale or Athlon/W2k cheat. There is a very easy way of spotting the difference: If someone is cheating, then everything they do will be speeded up - they shoot faster, drown quicker, and most importantly jump quicker. So if you see someone bounding along with the normal jump time interval it's unlikely that they're cheating. If a HWGuy is outrunning a Scout and not jumping he is cheating, although there may be other cheats I don't know about.
I certainly didn't invent bunny hopping, it has been done for years in Quake1 which shares the same physics as Half-Life and hence TFC. In Quake2 you have strafe jumping, very effective in that game, but doesn't carry so well to TFC although it still has its uses and certainly shouldn't be dismissed. Quake3 also has strafe jumping, not as fast as in Quake2 but still something you shouldn't be without. Since I stopped playing Quake3 people may well have found ways to get faster but I wouldn't know.
Strafe Jumping
This is something everyone should learn, it's a lot easier than bunny hopping and even if you do it badly you don't end up any slower so you have nothing to lose. It appears to be most effective when Scout, and I will still strafe jump as scout combined with a bit of bunny hopping to go round corners and long straight bits until I lose my speed. With practice you should be able to get a HWGuy to keep up with a Soldier and Soldier keep up with a Engineer without too much trouble.
To get started using strafe jumping simply hold down forward and a strafe key and start jumping. This will boost your speed to some extent. To get more speed you really need to bring the mouse into play and preferably alternate between the strafe keys each jump although if you can go round in a big arc then alternating strafe isn't necessary. For example, strafe left and look slightly left, on the next jump flick the mouse around to looking slightly right and strafe right and so on. With practice you should get a feel with what works best and just do it without thinking about it.
Bunny Hopping
Bunny hopping can be a frustrating but very rewarding thing to learn. With practice you should be able to get a HWGuy up to Medic speed in a short space of time. Unlike strafe jumping the maximum speed you obtain isn't proportional to which class you choose but mainly down to your technique, so although you will get a Medic to your best speed quickly, the Soldier will obtain the same speed, just more slowly. The slower the class the more severely your mistakes are punished. A Sniper with a charged rifle can be made to move along and a fairly respectable pace, but hit the jump key just slightly too late and you stop faster than any other class.
Bunny hopping works because there is a lot of air acceleration/control in TFC, which lets you do those little tricks such as curved rocket jumps and banana conc jumps etc.
To get the most amount of control in the air you have to let go of forward, using only the strafe keys and your mouse you can turn very sharp corners. You really have to master turning in the air before you think about bunny hopping.
You accelerate so fast when bunny hopping because the Half-Life engine will speed you up when turning corners. To witness this effect try slow walking in CS or TFC, then hold down strafe and turn 90 degrees, you will probably hear footsteps as you accelerate when cornering. In the air you have no friction, so the idea is to spend as much time as possible in the air while using the air control to do little turns which accelerate you to ever greater speeds.
To get a feel for bunny hopping try holding down one strafe key, turn the mouse in the direction of the strafe and hop, you should go round in little circles. This isn't very useful, although a single loop can be quite a good way to kick off your run.
To bunny hop in a straight line I usually start off with a strafe jump, before hitting the ground, let go of forward, press and hold the strafe key in the opposite direction to the strafe jump and turn the mouse the same way, press jump the instant you land, wait until you are about to land again, switch strafes, turn the mouse, land and press jump, continue doing this, alternating strafes and sweeping your mouse in little arcs. If you come to a corner simply hold strafe in the direction of the turn and move the mouse around the corner, hopefully you will gain some speed from the manoeuvre and shoot off down the next corridor. It's very hard to explain, and you learn what speeds you up from feel, so it's a case of practice, practice, practice. You will need a jump button you can keep pressing while staying in full control of everything else. The timing of the jump is critical, jump to late and you slow down, jump to early and you don't jump at all, again it's a case of lots of practice.
So to sum up: Never press forward. Time the jumps to the split second. Don’t expect to be able to do it without lots and lots of practice.
Bunny hopping is not easy and I recommend you practise normal strafe jumping a lot first before you think about having a serious go at it. Once you have mastered normal strafe jumping, try doing rocket jumps off walls to boost your speed sideways rather than upwards and preserving the speed for as long as possible. You can press forward when doing this, but you wont be able to steer. Once you can keep the speed up for 4 or 5 hops then you should be ready to go on and start trying to bunny hop without any explosions to help you. I find I get better speed on an Internet server than if I create my own LAN game so its best to practice it online. The demos I recorded are all in my own LAN game because I found online demos far to jerky.
Credits must go to Cinclant who originally posted an excellent guide to all types of jumping in QuakeWorld including bunny hopping on his column at Challenge-NZ a long time ago, but this has unfortunately now been removed. Astrochimp also posted an excellent guide for bunny hopping in Counter-Strike which you should definitely check out for another perspective as the technique is the same in CS as it is in TFC. [Editors note: this also seems to have been removed now]