Bunny hopping, or
bunny jumping, is a term used in video games to describe the basic movement technique in which a player jumps repeatedly instead of running in order to move faster and/or to avoid enemy fire.
Concept
The term is most used in
first-person shooterFirst-person shooter is a video game genre which centers the gameplay around gun- and projectile weapon-based combat through the first person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits...
s to refer to act of pressing the jump key 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
zigzagA zigzag is a pattern made up of small corners at variable angles, though constant within the zigzag, tracing a path between two parallel lines; it can be described as both jagged and fairly regular....
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. 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
TribesStarsiege: Tribes is a sci-fi first-person shooter video game. It is the first of the Tribes video game series and follows the story from Earthsiege and Starsiege...
,
Tribes 2Tribes 2 is a sci-fi first-person shooter computer game based in the fictional Earthsiege universe. As the name indicates it is the second game in the Tribes franchise, following Starsiege: Tribes. It was developed by Dynamix and published by the company then known as Sierra Entertainment in...
,
QuakeWorldQuakeWorld is an update to id Software's seminal multiplayer deathmatch game, Quake, that enhances the game's multiplayer features to allow people with dial-up modems to achieve greatly improved responsiveness when playing on Internet game servers...
,
Quake IIQuake II, released on December 9, 1997, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by id Software and distributed by Activision. It is not a sequel to Quake; it merely uses the name of the former game due to id's difficulties in acquiring a trademark for alternative titles.The soundtrack for...
,
Quake III ArenaQuake III Arena , is a multiplayer first-person shooter computer and video game released on December 2, 1999. The game was developed by id Software and featured music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly...
,
Half-Life,
Team Fortress ClassicTeam Fortress Classic, also known as Team Fortress 1.5, is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter video game developed by the Valve Corporation. A remake of the Team Fortress modification for Quake, Team Fortress Classic was originally released for Windows on 7 April 1999 as a free addition...
,
War§owWarsow is a multiplayer first-person shooter computer game first publicly released on June 8, 2005. The game is actively developed by a crew of freelance software developers and artists....
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NexuizNexuiz is a first-person shooter by Alientrap Software. It is a free game: source code is free software and data is free content. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License . Version 1.0 was released on May 31, 2005...
,
Enemy Territory Fortress,
Kingpin: Life of CrimeKingpin: Life of Crime is a first-person shooter developed by Xatrix Entertainment and published by Interplay Entertainment in June 1999. The game begins with the player character wounded and beaten up by the Kingpin's henchmen, and the story follows his thirst for revenge...
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DystopiaDystopia is a team-based, objective-driven, first-person shooter video game, developed as a total conversion modification on the Valve Corporation's proprietary Source engine. It is based on the cyberpunk literary genre; created by an amateur development team and released to the public for free...
,
Half-Life 2Half-Life 2 is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game and the sequel to the highly acclaimed Half-Life. It was developed by Valve Corporation and was released on November 16, 2004, following a protracted five-year, $40 million development cycle during which the game’s source code was...
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Battlefield 2Battlefield 2 is a computer game by the Swedish developer Digital Illusions. During development, Trauma Studios contributed to the development of the game after it was acquired by Digital Illusions CE...
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SoldatSoldat is a Polish 2D multiplayer game for Windows. It is a side-scroller inspired by Liero and Scorched Earth, combined with elements from Counter-Strike and Worms. The game is shareware. Registration unlocks extra aesthetic options, such as colored jet flames and custom interfaces...
,
Painkiller,
Baldur's Gate: Dark AllianceBaldur's Gate: Dark Alliance is an action role-playing game developed by Snowblind Studios for the PlayStation 2, and later for the Xbox, Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance.-Plot:...
, and
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.
The execution, effectiveness, and limits of bunny hopping varies across different game engines and mods. For example, in
Team Fortress ClassicTeam Fortress Classic, also known as Team Fortress 1.5, is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter video game developed by the Valve Corporation. A remake of the Team Fortress modification for Quake, Team Fortress Classic was originally released for Windows on 7 April 1999 as a free addition...
, 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 ProjectThief: The Dark Project is a first-person stealth game developed for Windows by Looking Glass Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. Released in 1998, it is set in a medieval steampunk metropolis called the City...
, 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 EngineThe Dark Engine is the computer game engine used for the Looking Glass Studios games Thief: The Dark Project , Thief II: The Metal Age , and the Looking Glass/Irrational Games title System Shock 2 .- Features :...
titles. In
Starsiege: TribesStarsiege: Tribes is a sci-fi first-person shooter video game. It is the first of the Tribes video game series and follows the story from Earthsiege and Starsiege...
, 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 shooterA tactical shooter is a subgenre of shooter game that includes both first-person shooters and third-person shooters. These games typically simulate realistic combat, thus making tactics and caution more important than quick reflexes in other action games...
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
staminaEndurance is the ability for an animal to exert itself for a long period of time. In humans, it is usually used in aerobic or anaerobic exercise. The definition of 'long' varies according to the type of exertion - minutes for high intensity anaerobic exercise, hours or days for low intensity...
. For example, in
America's ArmyAmerica's Army is a series of video games and other media developed by the United States Army and released as a global public relations initiative to help with recruitment, originally envisioned by Colonel Casey Wardynski. America's Army was conceived by Colonel Casey Wardynski and is managed by...
, 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-StrikeCounter-Strike is a tactical first-person shooter video game which originated from a Half-Life modification by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe...
. It has also been implemented in
Team Fortress ClassicTeam Fortress Classic, also known as Team Fortress 1.5, is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter video game developed by the Valve Corporation. A remake of the Team Fortress modification for Quake, Team Fortress Classic was originally released for Windows on 7 April 1999 as a free addition...
, 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 AssaultArmA: Armed Assault is a tactical military first- and third-person shooter which was developed by a 40 member team at Bohemia Interactive , an independent game developer based in the Czech Republic.ArmA is the spiritual successor to Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis and features an overhauled...
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, which is harder to achieve compared to other games. It allows the player to become a very difficult target to hit (besides, the AI always target the head, so this can reduce damage). 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 easily reachable by normal jumping.
Bunnyhopping in Quake engine and GoldSrc engine games
QuakeWorldQuakeWorld is an update to id Software's seminal multiplayer deathmatch game, Quake, that enhances the game's multiplayer features to allow people with dial-up modems to achieve greatly improved responsiveness when playing on Internet game servers...
,
Counter-StrikeCounter-Strike is a tactical first-person shooter video game which originated from a Half-Life modification by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe...
and
Team Fortress ClassicTeam Fortress Classic, also known as Team Fortress 1.5, is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter video game developed by the Valve Corporation. A remake of the Team Fortress modification for Quake, Team Fortress Classic was originally released for Windows on 7 April 1999 as a free addition...
use derivatives of the
Quake engineThe Quake engine is the game engine that was written to power 1996's Quake, written by id Software. It featured true 3D real-time rendering and is now licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License ....
, so the techniques used to perform bunny-hopping in these games are nearly identical.
QuakeWorld has "
pogo stickA pogo stick is a device consisting of a pole with a handle at one end, footpads on the other and a spring which supports the stick and user when on the ground. Usually considered a children's toy, it is used for hopping up and down by use of the spring....
" 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. 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).
Bunny hopping/strafe jumping is very effective in
Quake III ArenaQuake III Arena , is a multiplayer first-person shooter computer and video game released on December 2, 1999. The game was developed by id Software and featured music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly...
and some other games that use its engine, such as
Jedi Knight 2.
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. 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 huge advantages to the Special Forces and Assault classes. It was eventually seen as an unsporting and unfair tactic and also a kickable/bannable offence on many servers. 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. These techniques thus caused large balancing issues.
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 the player's sprint stamina is reduced and a player is not able to fire while jumping. However, it still remains an effective way to evade fire, although believed to be unrealistic.
Bunny hopping/crouch-leaning in Soldier of Fortune 2
Although not considered 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 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 SoftwareRaven Software is an American video game developer.The company was founded in 1990 by brothers Brian and Steve Raffel. In 1997, Raven made an exclusive publishing deal with Activision and was subsequently acquired by them....
.