Bunnyhopping from the Programmer's Perspective
flafla2.github.io
flafla2.github.io
Asheron's Call had a similar bug, although it took a while to be discovered. There was a buried feature that allowed you to turn/rotate, your character by clicking your mouse on the screen in certain locations. Your rotation speed was controlled by how far from the origin the mouse was located and ramped up to a capped rotation speed after a certain distance. The closer you were to the origin, the slower your rotation speed. The game came out around 1998 when most people were playing on 800x600 or maybe 1024x768 screens and since the possible rotation speeds you could achieve were directly related to the pixel width of the viewport, there was effectively a limit to the slowness of your rotation. Fast forward half a decade and people are playing on dual 1600x1200 screens and you can now turn reeeally slow if you get your cursor in the right position (and enabled the rarely used feature). Well, you could combine this slow rotation with strafe-running to make your velocity vector scale out many multiples of your normal run speed. In-game, other people viewed you as essentially teleporting (game had slow updates and basic client-side prediction) huge distances at a time. Not too long after this exploit was found, they introduced a new game client (for other reasons) that didn't have the mouse turn feature (I don't think anyone ever really used it in the previous ~7 years), so it was no longer possible to use. My friend and I had some fun nights on the PK server being able to just 'disappear' from a fight at will.
I am so used to bunny hopping that I feel handicapped in any FPS that doesn't let me do it. If I ever get my FPS project going, it'll sure as heck have this feature.
Literally anything that can impair you adds to the skill cap because it's another thing you have to learn to use/avoid.
We must also answer questions like "Is it credibility-destroyingly stupid to have players flying around at high speed in a semi-realistic military shooter" and "is this even fun" and "what effect does this have on the intended balance & map design". I don't know the answers for CS but in general I often see criticism of the status quo in games met with with knee-jerk "this increases the skill cap, learn to play" responses.
So I guess bunny hopping and such will remain a thing for old timers who stick to the old classics. And boy do they have a ton of fun :) Although it would be nice to see some new players. Old players get old and tired...
To vehementi: bunny hopping and all the other stuff you can master to become better at a game really is a ton of fun. I don't think breaking balance is as big of an issue as some here make it out to be, though it obviously depends on the map and mode. But in general, if your foe can bunny hop, so can you. Sometimes they start in a position where it's way more advantageous to them. But in my experience it's just not very common. And thankfully, with the good games, we are not tied to the stock maps put out by the company behind the game.. instead there's a community of gamers and mappers, and the community will adapt.
Many stock maps suck anyway, whether you have bunny hopping or not. For example, many of the stock Q3A maps are regarded as crap, and aren't really played at all in competitive matches. Bunny hopping however is a core mechanic in these games and iD was well aware of it.
These kinds of exploits don't increase the skill cap because you can't figure out how to do it while you're playing the guy whose exploiting. If some guy found a new spot to bounce nades off of, or a new place to peak, you can learn and reason about that and react after a few rounds. There's literally nothing you can do here unless you magically discover how to exploit a bug to move faster.
Continuing my point, during the development of Quake 2, bunny hopping was "fixed" but players complained, and it eventually got added back in. It remains a central part of Quake gameplay. Action Quake 2, a mod for Quake 2, had bunny hopping in it like Quake 2. The mod developers then moved on and made Counter Strike. CS featured bhoping prominently up until version 1.3.
These games have always lived and breathed bunny hopping, it has been a huge part of the game, and has influenced the creation of many games (CPMA, Warsow, DeFRaG, etc), and even started a new genre of game that requires of focuses on skilled movement.
Citation, https://joliesjunk.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-history-of-c...
It gives skilled players an edge, without being completely broken, so it seems like a good way of balancing your game to me.
It really shows how much of an advantage it was if you knew how to bunny hop.
Basically, you take the same air-strafing principles from this article, add a little bunny-hopping, and another "feature" of counterstrike where if you land on a steep enough slope you won't take falling damage or apply friction. Give this to some insane map makers and the end result is an incredibly skill-intensive obstacle course of sorts at tremendously high speeds.
Here's a good example of what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Xv00yJhjs
There's a really dedicated community behind this stuff, you can find 64-man servers full of people playing this type of map in CS:GO and CS:Source.
It's used in speedruns, but I believe is fixed these days. Apprently if you're bunnyhopping backwards, the game tries to limit the speed, but since you're going backwards the player ends up accelerating essentially indefinitely.
Commonly it was called kStyle or "korean style" in west since the game was korean and koreans came up with the bug. It made the game everyone was doing it flying through the map with swords swinging wildly it was a lot of fun and definitely raised the skill ceiling and someone how it didn't seem nearly as cheaty as the bunnyhopper in articles video.
Quake 1 had a feature where if a player took damage, they'd get pushed in the direction the damage came from. This was originally intended to serve as a visual indicator.
Of course, this meant that if you aimed the rocket launcher at your feet, and jumped and fired simultaneously, the damage kick + the jump would launch you a good distance upward. This became a popular enough technique that it was retained in the Quake sequels, and even imitated in games like Half-Life (the Gauss Gun would push you backwards, allowing a "rocket jump" of sorts)...
In the later years of the game, people even figured out disc jumping in midair off of their own grenade.
Edit: here's a quick Tribes 1 video where a guy skis around the enemy base, team kills his own flag carrier, catches the flag in midair, and disc jumps home to cap it.
Thanks for sharing :)