Скачать или смотреть Quake 3: Strafe technique

A quick clip showing the player inputs on rigorously-developed strafing technique in Quake 3. This is a hybrid technique for strafe lanes dating back to Maphive in 2003, where the strengths of one-beat and half-beat styles are mixed. The first three jumps are done one-beat, with half-beat taking over past that.

The keypresses are shown as well as the cgaz HUD so that the yaw angles can be observed relative to the ideal.

Perhaps the most important thing in good strafing is to get to the point where you can "feel" the acceleration. That is, where you don't need to see the speed display to have a strong grasp on whether you're accelerating well. When first starting, however, the speed display is useful to be able to tell what technique is working and what is not.

It's also helpful to realize that you can queue a jump by holding the jump key before landing. By doing this, you perform a jump the instant you touch the ground, resulting in no frictional loss of speed. This is the number one thing that makes successive jumps so easy in Quake compared to other games like Half-Life. Keep the holding duration as short as possible though, as it does reduce peak acceleration.

Also note that pitch angle doesn't affect acceleration at all. I have a bit of up and down motion in my strafing, but it's just a result of what motions are comfortable to do on the mousepad.

The cgaz HUD has four main pieces of information on it:

— Red bar: acceleration on the XZ-plane, going from negative on the left to positive on the right
— Green bar: visualization of the yaw angle ranges that produce acceleration. Keeping your yaw angle inside the dark green zones produces acceleration in XZ, with the magnitude maximized at the bright green side, falling off from there
— World axis bar: visualization of the world axis, divided into 90 degree color blocks
— Vector arrow: visualization of the current XZ player movement vector, independent of the mouselook direction

I don't find the cgaz HUD useful when strafing, but for analysis it's handy. Most players will find staring at the speed display most helpful.

This strafe lane is arguably the toughest one possible (humanly, within reason), so the technique must be highly refined to finish it—this makes it a great reference for people looking to get started in the right direction.

(Clips recorded in Fraps to capture the HUD, so unfortunately there is no motion blur)

** 09 Jan 2012 ** Just thought I'd add that while the technique is by no means bad in this video, the first three jumps have some problems with straightness relative to the lane. Doing a second jump as it's done in this video yields very high pad speed, but comes up short on straight distance covered, meaning it fails hard seconds like orange 2 bonus and the red lane.

The fix: do the 2nd pad air change much earlier. Shortening distance becomes important here, so you want to avoid too much diagonal motion. That 687 second is worth only as much as its direction :-)