Do you strafe-jump in Open Arena ?

I’ve been playing a FOSS Quake 3 Arena(Q3A) clone , Open Arena , which I asked a great friend to download for me(its a measly 76 mB binary) . When I fired it, I was amazed to see that it had the exact look and feel of Q3A! You know what, there’s a pre-installed mod called Quake 3 Arena Mod in it which might be responsible for the similar menu and HUD. A lot of levels look the same and the guns are the same too, just that they’re modelled differently. The character modelling is fair, but my favourite ones are – Gargoyle and Kyonshi( Very detailed) .

Now, a good thing is, I can use any Q3 mod and map on it. Dunno about the characters, but the maps work. Since I don’t cheat, I went about playing the first map on Tier-1 (Yes, its uncannily similar to Q3A).

There was no rail gun on the first level( And I’m not good at railing… Call me a rocket-whore if you please :D). Two players on it, grimish and gargoyle. I started it with ‘Hurt Me Plenty’ dificulty( Don’t smirk, I was playing an FPS after a long time) . I was behind for quite some time. The frag limit was 20. I was like 4 and the others, 6 & 9. Hmm, as I started to get a hang of the map, its weapon placement, ammo, and stealth areas, I started to return back to fragging form. Yeah, I eventually won it by say 4-5 frags.

Now, you might think, where does strafe-jumping come in ? I read about it in an issue IC-CHIP way back in ’05. Hadn’t tried it( Frankly speaking, when you’re out there, all you want to do is frag and save your ass and not attempt a rocket jump when your health is 10 :D) thereafter. Today, when I was trying to save my ass on another map, completely with 5 bots and rail guns, I discovered, or rather re-discovered strafe-jumping. Here’s a video by some gamer (Notice the HUD) :

For those who don’t know, in Q3A, your speed is limited to 320 ups(units per sec). But strafe-jumping exploits a flaw in the game’s physics engine. So, if you master it, you can very well cross 600 ups. There are loads of sub-classes of it ( Yeah right, you thought its easy hun ? ) and can be used to save your ass in tight situations and help you reach that Quad-damage faster than your cousin. Since Open Arena is based on the Q3 engine, I get to use it here too. In fact, strafe-jumping is a fundamental and a very common technique used by pro-gamers in a variety of games like : QuakeWorld, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Quake 4, Cube, Jedi Knight 2, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Soldier of Fortune 2, Doom 3, Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory, Call of Duty, and Call of Duty 2 and also Counter-Strike.
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Tech bole to ??
Kaustav Acharya.