Bunny hopping

Bunny hopping (or commonly shortened to bhopping) is a term used in video games to describe an advanced movement technique in which a player jumps repeatedly, with the addition of strafing using the directional keys and strafe-jumping, in order to become a harder target to hit or (in some games) move faster than normal.^[1][2]

Concept

The term is most used in first-person shooters to refer to act of pressing the jump key together with a movement key (usually "A" or "D" depending on which direction you want to move, you also need to move your mouse along with the strafe keys) to move faster (especially when going down a slope) and/or to evade attacks more effectively. In several games based on Quake engines or their derivatives moving in a zigzag^[3] pattern while bunny hopping (see strafejumping) is the fastest way to move around and increases length of jumps, making the player an even more difficult target to hit. While a zigzag movement pattern may not be the fastest way to get from one point to another in other games, players may feel that the protection provided by bunny hopping more than compensates for this disadvantage. Bunny hopping might also be required to gain speed to perform a trick jump or to provide better movement control while in mid-air (especially after performing a trick jump).

Variations

Traditional bunny hopping is possible in many games such as QuakeWorld, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Painkiller, Counter-Strike, and Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Portal 2, Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, Natural Selection, Tribes, Tribes 2, Nexuiz, Enemy Territory Fortress, Kingpin: Life of Crime, Dystopia, Battlefield 2, Soldat, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. Bunny hopping was also an integral part of the games Half-Life 2 and America's Army, but bunny hopping has been removed from the current version.

The execution, effectiveness, and limits of bunny hopping varies across different game engines and mods. For example, in Team Fortress Classic, the way to begin the jumps is much different from the Quake series: it begins by strafing, then aiming in the strafe direction, then jumping and so on.

In Thief: The Dark Project, bunny hopping can be used to reach incredible speeds as the player's speed increases with each consecutive hop, enabling them to out-pace even the fastest of enemies, or kill themselves spectacularly, depending on whether they collide with anything. As a result, the bunny hopping bug was removed in later Dark Engine titles.

In Starsiege: Tribes, bunny hopping is remarkably effective at generating speed when performed on a downward slope due to an unintended effect of the game's physics model; the practice, known as "skiing" in the Tribes series, was so popular that the two sequels officially incorporated skiing as a simple held keypress and a part of basic A.I. movement.

Accelerated Backwards Hopping

In an attempt to patch bunny hopping in Valve's Source Engine, Valve added negative speed when you were moving forward. However, another glitch was discovered some time later called Accelerated Backwards Hopping, or ABH for short. By tricking the game into thinking that you're going forwards, you can add backwards speed and go very fast backwards. This can be used to move up to 6 times faster than bunnyhopping.

Use in tactical shooters

In the tactical shooter subgenre, the lack of realism introduced by this ability is often compensated for by limiting the effectiveness of consecutive jumps or by the introduction of limited stamina. For example, in America's Army, every jump consumes a large portion of CEM (in comparison to sprinting, which consumes it at a slower pace), and lower CEM results in slower, smaller jumps, and less accuracy. CEM is often confused with stamina in America's Army, though there is no actual stamina in the game (for example, unlike stamina, CEM has no effect on running speed). Thus bunny hopping can still be seen in those games, but it is much less effective and therefore, less common. Another way of limiting this ability is to slow down movement speed after landing. This technique is used in later versions of Counter-Strike and most known in "Counter Strike : Global Offensive". It has also been implemented in Team Fortress Classic, so that touching the ground while the player's speed is 170% or more of the normal speed, the player's speed will be set to the normal maximum run speed. Armed Assault takes the extreme approach of not having a jump ability at all, instead replacing it with a vaulting/step over feature, which is more realistic in combat situations but makes crossing larger obstacles or barriers all but impossible. This approach was also taken by the latest installment of the America's Army series, America's Army 3.

Bunny hopping in Counter-Strike is still recognized to be a very useful skill once the exact timing of the jump button is mastered, which is harder to achieve compared to other games It allows the player to become a very difficult target to hit. By jumping in a zig-zag motion, the player can cut corners extremely fast, which also gives an advantage of surprise over the enemy. It can also be used to reach places usually not reachable by normal jumping.

In Quake engine and GoldSrc engine games

QuakeWorld, James Bond 007: Nightfire, and Team Fortress Classic use derivatives of the Quake engine, so the techniques used to perform bunny-hopping in these games are nearly identical. QuakeWorld has "pogo stick" jumping (you can release and repress the jump button while flying in the air), while in the other games you have to jump right as you hit the ground. An acceleration is experienced in-air while uniformly turning in the same direction as the player is strafing-^[4] The act of timing your jumps to the exact moment when you hit the ground prevents the player from decelerating to normal walking speed. The strafing should also be timed in a particular way to the jumping for greatest effect. Using this technique unbroken, allows a player to gradually accelerate to speeds many times the typical running speed.

The speed at which one can bunnyhop is effectively limited by the turning radius: if too sharp a turn is made at high speed, speed is lost. In the some versions of Counter-Strike, the degree to which a player can make sharp turns while bunnyhopping without losing speed is regulated by the sv_airaccelerate server value. This value could be set to 0 to disable bunnyhopping, and had a maximum effective value of 20. ^[5]

As of Counter-Strike version 1.6, bunny-hopping has been made harder to perform. Some players use scripts and even hacks to bunny-hop.

As a result of the incredible speed bonuses achieved by a competent Counter-Strike bunny-hopper and the very significant advantage it provides, players who do not master the technique might consider it to be an unfair advantage, or cheating. Opponents of bunnyhopping claim it is an exploit unintended by the developers which probably explains why it was removed in the 1.1.0.8 patch^[6] (even though supporters still claim that it is simply a clever way to use the game's physics). In its day many Counter-Strike demos were recorded to demonstrate its incredible effectiveness in the form of trick jumps. Huge jumps could be performed, such as from building to building on cs_assault (sometimes sv_airaccelerate would have to be modified to perform such jumps, to allow higher speeds to be attained with smaller turning radii).^[7]

In James Bond 007: Nightfire, if a player's speed is greater than or equal to 1.5 times the server's sv_maxspeed and the jump button is pressed, their speed will effectively double each time they jump until their speed exceeds the sv_maxvelocity. This allows players to literally fly across entire maps. Since there is no limit apart from the max velocity, doing this while moving up hills can cause the player to be flung up into the air and hit the skybox, fall down and then continue jumping even faster if fall damage is turned off. In the original version of the game, lag compensation was not used and players took advantage of this exploit to avoid being hit by bullets and they were almost invincible moving at this rate of speed. Bunny hopping in Nightfire is generally called 'Pjumping' by players. In unofficial community-developed patches, lag compensation fixed the inability to be hit and server admins can disable the exploit entirely by changing the new 'sv_pjump' command off.

The sv_airaccelerate command was blocked in The Orange Box Source engine branch (Such as Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half Life 2).

Bunny hopping/moose humping is very effective in Quake III Arena and some other games that use its engine, such as Jedi Knight 2.

Bunny hopping turned into a competitive mod of the game Counter-Strike. Some public servers host bunny-hop maps that were made for bunny hoppers or "bhoppers" as they are colloquially known to display their skill at bunny hopping. Servers add timers that record the times of players from the start of a map to the finish and rank the times in a leaderboard. There are many hundreds of maps that are made for bhoppers. This gave the bhoppers a home after a patch eliminated bunny hopping in competitive play.

In the Battlefield series

Traditional bunny hopping has never been possible within the Battlefield series. However, there are several variations of bunny hopping depending on the game.

The exact purpose and benefits have evolved as DICE has released patches and fixes for this tactic. A player could come around a corner, and, coming across an enemy, jump in an unpredictable direction while firing their weapon. Combining this with the far range a player could throw a C4 charge and the splash damage of the grenade launcher, the tactic gave advantages to the Special Forces and Assault classes. It was eventually seen as an unsporting and unfair tactic. This technique was eventually abolished with a game patch.

A similarly unsporting tactic was used with the Support class, with its light machine gun, which is meant to be very powerful, but with the drawback that it is very inaccurate unless the player goes prone. This drawback could be negated by "dolphin diving", in which the player goes prone in mid-air, in order to gain the accuracy advantage of being prone.

DICE has made attempts to reduce the effectiveness of jumping during combat in Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142. For example, one update to Battlefield 2 made players unable to fire while in mid-air. However, it still remains an effective way to evade fire.

In Soldier of Fortune 2

Although not considered true bunny hopping by many people, this technique, only possible due to the unique crouch-lean movement available in Soldier of Fortune 2, is a mid-level technique specifically used by SOF2 players to take advantage of the hit box issues present with some weapons within the game (MP5, USAS, M590). Its done with a command in console /com_maxfps 333 . Thus increasing fps makes graphics smooth. These weapons, unlike the other weapons in the game, calculate damage based on the location of a hit box, rather than the actual body, meaning that the actual target would not correctly match the visible model during leaning. By combining the traditional zig-zag pattern of bunny hopping with a period of crouch-leaning after each jump, it was thus possible to combine this visual confusion with the drastic vertical and horizontal movements of bunny hopping to make it much harder to get a good hit on a player. While this movement was also effective against the game's other weapons, with the increased vertical and horizontal changes possible with crouch-lean, the effects were noticeably less disorienting. While attempts to fix this issue were attempted by several mods (most noticeably OSP), these fixes never smoothly solved the issue within the game, and no official fix was ever forthcoming from the game's producer, Raven Software.

In Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory

In the online multiplayer PC game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and its expansion Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory, this phenomenon is usually referred to as 'Strafe-jumping',^[8] and can be used to gain huge amounts of speed and by performing a trickjump on a slope players are also able to translate that speed to vertical speed and get to else impossible to reach places. On the default maps, most places are protected with so-called 'clip brushes', providing collision so the player can't reach it.

In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Bunny hopping has a role in the multiplayer game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on both a casual and competitive level. Bunny hopping can be accomplished by stringing together multiple strafe jumps to be effective. Strafe jumping can be accomplished by strafing while in the air and jumping again once as soon as your character model hits the ground.

Bunny hopping can be used to increase the movement speed of the character to change positioning quickly. The default running speed with the knife out is 250 and is the fastest speed a player can accomplish without aid from the server or bunny hopping. The bunny hopping technique can be used to increase the speed of a character with any weapon equipped although official servers will set a max speed of 300 and once the speed is reached the character will be slowed back to 250 though will be allowed to reach 300 velocity after being slowed. The velocity of the character can be shown using the console command "cl_showpos 1".

On the casual level of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive there are many community made maps that aid in bunny hopping and have no limit on how fast a character can move. The objective of these servers is for the player to maneuver through maps of varying difficulty while bunny hopping. These servers are regularly referred to as "bhop" servers or maps and have become a very popular community made mini-game such as surfing. A characteristic that many of these servers share is that they are 128-tick servers which means the server is much more consistent than the average 64-tick servers.

On the competitive level of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive bunny hopping is more difficult to accomplish than on dedicated bunny hopping servers. This is caused by Valve and their use of 64-tick servers for competitive matchmaking. This means that the servers are less consistent than a higher tick servers and bunny hopping becomes difficult because of this inconsistency. When bunny hopping is accomplished it can give the player a large advantage. Counter-Strike is a fast-paced game that depends on players to either rotate or take a bomb site quickly, bunny hopping allows players to have a faster movement speed and catch the enemy team off-guard by the speed of executions onto a site. Although bunny hopping allows players to move at a quicker speed than others, the accuracy of many weapons in the Counter-Strike series is greatly impacted while the player is moving and the inaccuracy of the weapon increases greatly. Bunny hopping has a place in the competitive scene of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive because of its advantages and drawbacks despite the difficulty to accomplish.

See also

• Exploit (online gaming)
• Rocket jumping, using momentum gained from splash weapons

Notes

1. "Learning How to Fly, Literally". ESReality. 20 October 2003. Retrieved 24 March 2008.
2. Butler, Tom (20 January 2014). "The Rise of The Jump". Polygon. Retrieved 3 January 2016.
3. Zig Zag at QuakeWorld wiki
4. Bunnyhop QuakeWorld wiki
5. Bunny Hop script for CS:GO CS:S
6. http://www.mofunzone.com/game_patch_downloads/half_life_1_1_1_0.shtml
7. Dreaming of Jumps
8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qfdb087v2c