Strafing (video games)

Strafing in video games is a maneuver which involves moving a controlled character or entity sideways relative to the direction it is facing.

This may be done for a variety of reasons, depending on the type of game; for example, in a first-person shooter, strafing would allow one to continue tracking and firing at an opponent while moving in another direction.

[1] Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons.

[8] Many shooters will allow players to aim down the sights of a gun or use a scope, usually exchanging movement speed and field of vision for greater accuracy.

This can be a crucial strategy against bosses and powerful enemies, and is notably employed in many The Legend of Zelda titles, starting with Ocarina of Time.

[6] The game combines these actions and the player achieves roughly 1.4 (square root of 2) times the speed they would moving in a single direction.

[12][13] Strafe-jumping is a technique used to increase a player's movement speed in computer games based on the Quake engine and its successors, most of which are first-person shooters, by jumping and turning one direction or the other with the mouse and using the strafe keys.

[14] Strafe-jumping was a result of a bug in the code base of the 1997 first-person shooter video game Quake II.

Sustained strafe-jumping is mainly a matter of muscle memory, as both the required range and precision of mouse movements increase as the player builds up speed.

[17] The pre-strafe (also known as circle jumping) is an action performed by the player at the start of strafe-jumping, giving an initial burst of speed.

[18] The earliest (and most advanced) method of bunny hopping that utilized strafing controls exists in Quake, the Quake III Arena mod Challenge ProMode Arena, and their derivatives such as Warsow and Xonotic; Half-Life (version 1.1.0.8, released in 2001, introduced a speed cap limiting the effectiveness of bunny hopping[19]) and many of its mods and sibling games such as Team Fortress Classic, Team Fortress 2, Dystopia, and the Counter-Strike series; Painkiller, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Kingpin: Life of Crime, Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends.