It’s vital to move the mouse smoothly, because any abrupt sudden movements will slow you down. Keep holding the jump key and the strafe key and smoothly and steadily turn your mouse into the strafe direction (in my example, right). Once you’ve released the forward key (while still keeping the jump key pressed), hold down the strafe key in the direction you want to turn (for sharp right turn: strafe right). In order to perform sharper turns without loosing speed, thus making you more agile, do the following:īefore the turn, while still bunny hopping, release the forward key. If you continue to press the forward key and simply turn the mouse, you’ll hardly manage to make a sharp turn (unless you stop jumping, which slows you down a lot). However, you’ll face complications if you now try to turn once you gained some speed. This is quite easy and there’s nothing really to master about plain forward bunny hopping. If you press the forward button while holding the jump button, you’ll continuously get faster until you hit the acceleration limit. The good thing is that you only need to keep the jump button pressed and you will jump again once you hit the ground (unless of course you disabled that in Settings → Input). By constantly jumping (“bunny hopping”) you can keep ground contact to a minimum. One of the keys to gain high speeds in Xonotic is therefore to touch the ground as little as possible.

When you just walk around though, your feet are in constant contact with the ground, so the friction is slowing you down a lot. In Xonotic you have a lot of movement control while you are in the air (“air control”), and to a great extent you’ll accelerate when pressing the forward button while flying. You may have noticed that players race around the maps at insane speeds, making them hard to hit and also hard to tell from which direction they’ll come next, should you survive an attack. Understanding and mastering Xonotic’s movement is a key success factor in this game, apart from making it incredibly fun to play once you get the hang of it. MovementĮven though people tend to be more interested in what the weapons do when they first try out a new first person shooter, I prefer to follow the structure that I established for my live newbie tutorials and to start off with the movement. The purpose of this Newbie Corner is to allow any new player to develop the same skills that experienced players have already gained, simply by showing how it works. The skill gap between newbies and experienced players mostly results from newbies not knowing gameplay mechanics and therefore lacking the ability to acquire skill in the first place. There are a couple of mechanisms implemented in the game that effectively prevent cheating, and from my personal experience I am confident to say that cheating is not really an issue in Xonotic. That’s how I myself learned about blaster jumping and strafe turning for example.Įven if the skill gap between you and another player is immense, it is highly improbable that the other player is cheating. Some of them might even offer to show you around by giving you a short live tutorial. Most of the experienced players will take their time to shortly explain gameplay techniques to newbies if asked nicely.

If you meet very strong players online and wonder how they do certain things, it usually pays off to simply ask them. Remember that the Xonotic player community is generally considered a very friendly and helpful one and for many people (including me) this is the key aspect that gets one hooked to this game. If you want to fully apply the knowledge gained from this guide, search for vanilla servers - Normal category in the server browser. The XDF ruleset has different physics and a separate video-guide called XDF Academy. Note that whereas movement aspects should usually apply more or less unchanged to modified servers offering InstaGib, vehicle CTF or Overkill gameplay, I will not explain the specifics of these game mutators/rulesets - I simply lack the expertise in non-vanilla game modes. This guide aims at showing all fundamental aspects of vanilla Xonotic gameplay to enable new players to pick up the ropes quickly.

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