Bunny hopping

Bunny hopping, or bunny jumping, is a term used in computer and video games to describe the basic movement technique in which a player jumps repeatedly instead of running in order to move faster or/and to avoid enemy fire.

Concept

The term is most used in first-person shooters to refer to act of pressing the jump key repeatedly while holding a movement key to move faster and/or to evade attacks more effectively. In several games based on quake engines or their derivatives moving in a zigzag pattern while bunny hopping (see strafejumping) is the fastest way to move around and increases the height and length of jumps, making the player an even more difficult target. 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 Tribes, Tribes 2, QuakeWorld, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, War§ow, Nexuiz, Enemy Territory Fortress, Kingpin: Life of Crime, Dystopia, Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2 , Soldat, and Painkiller.

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 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.

Use in tactical shooters

In the tactical shooter sub-genre, 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 (you don't run faster with full CEM than with low CEM). 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. 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 which is more realistic in combat situations but makes crossing obstacles or barriers, even small ones, all but impossible.

Bunny hopping in Counter-Strike is still recognized to be a very useful skill once the exact timing of the jump button is mastered -- i.e. harder to master compared to other games. It allows the player to become a very difficult target to hit from the enemy stand point (besides, the AI always target the head, so this can reduce damage). By jumping in the zig zag motion, the player can cut corners extremely fast also giving an advantage of surprise over the enemy. It can also be used to easily reach places usually not easily reachable by normal jumping.

Bunnyhopping in Quake engine and GoldSrc engine games

Quakeworld, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic utilize 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. 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 old 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.

As of Counter-Strike version 1.6, bunny-hopping has been made harder to perform. To do the technique, 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, many players consider the technique to be a cheat. Opponents of bunnyhopping claim it is an exploit unintended by the developers and supporters 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).

Bunnyhopping/strafejumping in Quake III Arena, Quakeworld (and Jedi Knight 2 - which uses the Q3A engine), is very effective.

Bunnyhopping in the Battlefield Series

There are several variations of bunny hopping depending on the game.

The exact purpose and benefits have evolved as EA has released patches and fixes for this tactic. Before a patch which disabled players being able to jump in a zig zag motion while also firing their weapon, combining this with the far range a player could throw a C4 and the splash damage of the grenade launcher, the tactic gave huge advantages to the Special Forces and Assault classes. It was eventually seen to as an unfair tactic and also a kickable/bannable offense on servers depending on the owners of the servers preference. Players could jump round a corner, come across an enemy and begin to jump in a random direction while firing, some people viewed this as "unsporting", along with bunny hopping and firing the weapon people would also prone in "mid air" which became to be known as dolphin diving. Dolphin Diving gave the Light Machine Gun using Support class a huge advantage, as the Support whose weapon is very powerful but only if he is stationary would be able to move across the map at normal speeds with the high accuracy he would have had if he remained prone and stationary. This also caused a large balancing issue.

Due to the huge balancing issues the tactics caused EA has made attempts to reduce the use of this in Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142. With each jump a portion of your sprint stamina is reduced and a player is not able to fire while hopping. However, it still remains an effective way to evade fire, although believed to be unrealistic.

Bunnyhopping/Crouch-leaning in Soldier of Fortune 2

Although not considered as true bunnyhopping by many people, this technique, only possible due to the unique crouch-lean movement available in SOF2, 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). 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 bunnyhopping 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 bunnyhopping to greatly increase the difficulty involved in hitting a player. While with the increased vertical and horizontal changes possible with crouch-lean, this movement was also effective against the game's other weapons, 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.

See also

• Exploit (online gaming)