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Brian Shih

I live in San Francisco, and work at Pocket Gems. THERE ARE WORDS ON THIS PAGE. Not all of them are true.

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12 Jul 2010
July 12th, 7:26pm 2 comments

Fixin' thangs

Reading this post on the difference between Starcraft and Starcraft 2 game mechanics (in particular, pathing) reminded me of strafe-jumping, which started a bug in the Quake physics engine, but eventually became so prevalent that they purposefully included it in every Quake engine (and therefore games based on the Quake engine like Counter-strike Call of Duty) since.

Which begs the question, when does a buggy game mechanic become part of the game itself, and should we go out of our way to try and fix them all? It smacks vaguely of the Star Wars "special editions" saga, but then, this is Starcraft Two, not Starcraft: Special Edition we're talking about. 

Edit: whoops, silly me - Counter-strike isn't based on the Quake engine.

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Comments (2)

Jul 13, 2010
Brad said...
The original Call of Duty was built using the Quake 3 engine. Most of Infinity Ward's tech is still rooted in that framework. For that game in particular, strafe-jumping was something that was just unavoidable due to the physics engine. Ultimately, IW patched out bunnyhopping in the original CoD as well as several derivative tactics. They were fine leaving strafe-jumping in the game because it was only useful in a few trick jump scenarios.

The other thing I found strange about those Quake 3 engine games - you could jump higher if you locked your framerate to 125 or 333 fps.

Jul 13, 2010
Brian Shih said...
Yeah, I believe it was due to rounding point error and how it calculated your max speed. I distinctly remember testing it out on Quake 3 and it's very noticeable.

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