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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I have played FPS games for as long as they have existed, competitively in the early days of CS. I don’t see why adding this feature deliberately would be appealing. It makes the game look unnatural for what? There are tons of hard to use glitches in every FPS game and the policy on any enjoyable server is “no glitching”, that is - play the game as the developer intended or be kicked. This bug was just too widely used to be considered unfair but thankfully games these days use movement code without obvious bugs like this.

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Something might start out as a glitch, but then be embraced by the playerbase and become a really interesting and beautiful mechanic.

Rocket jumping could be considered a glitch. It was never really designed, it was just an outcome of the physics system in quake. But it stuck, and later on it was added to TF2 (built on a distant descendant of the quake engine) as a central mechanic. Without it, you wouldn't have cool stuff like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUQJVhfEe_Y

As someone who played a lot of quake in the day, I'll be the first to admit that bunny-hopping is an absurd-looking mechanic. However, a lot of people talk about movement mechanics in video games today, because movement should be one of the most dependable and flexible tools at your disposal in an FPS. Bunnyhopping added the extra nuance of being able to maintain speed, accelerate and strafe all at at the same time. If you mastered Quake's movement (namely bhopping and rocket jumping), you had an objective advantage over your opponent. Even if the other person had better aim, you still had the opportunity to out-maneuver them, which is something I seldom see inside modern video games.

As others have pointed out, a lot of these become important game mechanics and fully incorporated into the game, you can think of it as a kind of serendipitous or accidental design. An example of roughly Quake-vintage is 'skiing' in Tribes, fully incorporated into the game in later versions:

https://tribes.fandom.com/wiki/Skiing

Cause its really fun to play using it. There are tons of community servers with autohop mods enabled.

At least in Quake this was not deliberate choice. It was fortunate accident. It took some time for people to discover bunny hopping and once somebody figured it out it took like a storm.

Hopping wasn't discovered immediately. I remember we were doing things like strafing into walls to speed up movement before we knew bunny hops are possible.

I don't think idSoftware predicted how the game would be used when they were working on it. I believe the movement mechanics is just a byproduct of simplistic movement calculations.

I also think most people discovered trimping before bunnyhopping, which is kinda surprising given how dependent it is on acceleration.

I think it took couple (2?) years before bunnyhopping was discovered. We knew there is a lot of funny things happening with physics in the game but nobody put them together.

We knew, that there is maximum forward and sidespeed but they way they add together is simple vector addition, so you could actually get higher maximum forward speed if you could point that vector forward.

We knew it is possible to preserve momentum when turning in air. We abused this jumping outside of ledges and then turning and going back to where you came from. This was very useful on dm2 where there is a ledge, a pool of laval and a wall that divides the ledge. You are supposed to press a button to actuate a ramp on which you could cross the lava but you could also just jump and turn in air violating any physical intuition. The jump can be seen here https://youtu.be/VT-johLi75w?t=128. This jump has a bunny hop component to it but it is not necessary.

it's not really surprising a bug like bunny hopping would exist, either. You have to realize at the time that everyone was coming from Doom and was still using keyboard movement. I was using keyboard movement in Quake. It wasn't until I joined in with a few friends in QuakeWorld that someone said "hey, you really need to start using a mouse to play." You could get away with keyboard in single player, but even back then you would get stomped by the mouselook players.

What's amusing is you could always tell the keyboard players back then, by the way they slowly turned around.

Anyway, playing with the mouse was a new thing. Mouse acceleration, dpi, etc. were all just experiments. Introducing a new way to move would surely uncover bugs hidden in the physics code that simply weren't possible to hit with keyboard movement.

> It took some time for people to discover bunny hopping

IMO back then you discovered it either by just playing, or by reading a game magazine. Back then (when Quake II was released), internet guides for games were less streamlined and available. Which was fun for gaming, as you could discover things on your own. It also meant things had to be less min-maxed. Think of a game like World of Warcraft or Diablo when it was just released, they have the very same problem.

> for what

It's fun and it adds depth! Bunnyhopping is easy to learn but hard to master, and (together with related movement mechanics) adds a lot of freedom and dynamism to the game.

Of course, simply adding bunnyhopping to a game built around more realistic movement will drastically change how it plays -- probably for the worse, if the original was well designed. But in the case of Quake it turned out to open up the game in a way that is both superficially fun and competitively interesting. Nowadays the games in the Quake lineage are built around the existence of bunnyhopping and/or strafejumping, and their maps are designed accordingly.

It looks unnatural when you put it in a game like CS, yes. But remember where CS came from, Action Quake.

Then you have games that put this front and center, and it looks completely natural, such as Warsow.

Action Quake II was the pinnacle of these for me. Such a fun game.

Glitches can really broaden the skill-gap:

Halo CE: backpack reload, double melee, quick camo, etc.

Halo 2: BXR, BXB, RRX, etc.

Halo 5: slide jump, bum jump, boost jump, etc.

Warzone: slide cancel.

But then again, some glitches don’t. Like super-jumping in H2.

It may be similar to fighting game motion inputs. They seem archaic and pointless when the same moveset can be expressed with just direction + button or something less complicated, but there are lots of analysis videos on why they have stuck around and the subtle differences in gameplay from them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WhbSNP_zF4

I'm a speedrunner. I understand the desire to make some glitches into ascended bits of functionality, but bunny-hopping is usually frame-perfect and that's not a good choice for a feature.

That said, walljumps in Mario games started as frame-perfect buggy jumps and later became much easier and reliable.

> bunny-hopping is usually frame-perfect

If you mean the timing of the jump, that's not the case in Quake and its (spiritual and official) successors. You can press the jump key early and hold it until after you land.

(If you mean optimal bunnyhopping is frame-perfect, maybe so, but it's not the kind of mechanic you're expected to master in the sense of performing it optimally; it's more like aiming in FPS games, or most skills in real sports, in that top-level players still vary in their proficiency and even the best are imperfect.)

There are plenty of games that have no intention of looking natural. I haven't played an FPS in ~20 years, but I distinctly recall bunny hopping being fun, all by itself.

Any game where you shoot rockets out of a rocket launcher to land and explode near your feet has long abandoned "unnatural".

Huh, and here I was thinking competitive FPS was a thing way before CS was even a mod, let alone mature and popular for tournaments

I think you misinterpreted a timeline here.

Really? Cause I remember attending Quake tournaments before CS was a thing. Things didn't even start with Quake, as there was also Doom. I understand if such games are not to your liking but they did exist

I mean I think you misinterpreted my post.

But instead of going back to read it again you misinterpreted my reply too (thinking I somehow was insisting on the thing you misinterpreted the first time!)

To be clear: all I said was 1) I played FPS’es for as long as they have existed (early 90s) 2) I played CS competitively. These two things are of course separate things and happened about a decade apart.

You are completely right. Sorry about that.

Guess I got too excited there for a second

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