Better Quake strafe-jumping with genetic algorithms 

As noted in the video, the 9.688 s demo I refer to as the world record actually got beaten a few days before I finished this video. It was too late to go back and re-do everything so I left it as-is. A couple of other notes and caveats for Quake experts: - I didn't mention cl_sidespeed / cl_forwardspeed for brevity / clarity reasons, however I actually recovered these values (or rather their ratio) from the demo too by including it as an optimization parameter. Similarly, I added it as a parameter for my strafebot optimization. The demo value is cl_sidespeed 1400, and the bot selected value is cl_sidespeed 1515 (both assuming a cl_forwardspeed of 800). If I fix cl_sidespeed to 1400 my bot gets 9.580s, about 0.04 seconds slower than it does with 1515, but still about 0.1 seconds faster than the old human WR. - I'm not sure if the 3-turn method is already known. I'd love to hear from any top speedrunners if they've tried this already, and what they found.

im sure the speedrunning community would like it if you could use this data to write a demo player movement verification tool, to help weed out the cheaters

You should also see HL/CS jumpers as their techniques are more complex - they turn multiple times

I wouldn't bat an eye if this video had 7 million views instead of 7,000. This stuff matches the production quality of 3Blue1Brown. Absolutely fantastic. Keep up the good work.

These videos deserve a significantly larger audience. The work you've put into them shines through.

Floored, FLOORED that you one-upped your previous work. Loved the wiggle worm and fascinated by the part about reversing a quantize operation. SO cool!

I understand that these videos must take a long time to make but just gonna say that I think that if the uploads were more regular your channel would explode for sure, you've got the quality of production nailed completely.

I don't know anything about computer science or algorithms or anything...but I did play Quake 3 a lot when I was younger. Your videos have been a great source of education and entertainment. I hope to see more videos in the future. Going to enjoy this one now

I love your videos always so interesting

Such a good quality breakdown of your process and paired with great video editing. Keep up the great work!

This is amazing, and the presentation is outstanding. Well done!

Very enjoyable video, as always. I would be surprised if people didn't try fitting in more strafes per jump to get a better trajectory, but the difficulty increase is massive. Just fitting in 2 strafes with proper power bunny hop technique took dozens of hours for me and my best time is still far from the record (9.98).

Amazing channel. Am looking forward to binging your videos this weekend.

Engineering at it's finest!!

Fantastic visualizations and impressive results :) I love all your videos I'd love to see in-eyes view of the 3-turn method

Fascinating. I'm not into competitive play, and I wasn't aware of strafe jumping. But I was aware of airborne turn velocity, and I always do 'wiggle jumps' when attempting to cross large gaps.

I don't play speed jump activities but I do enjoy watching them in not too lengthy batches every now and then :). I used to play quake 3 in 1999 and 2000

Loving your videos man

Great video, thanks for doing this. I would be interested in seeing the complete code.

Adding more strafes has long been known as a way to gain more air speed, it's just the risk of messing up the extra strafes is commonly accepted to be not worth the speed. There's actually an entire long-jump community in CSGO dedicated to seeing how much speed one can gain during a jump with successful strafes, measured by how large of a gap you can cross in one jump. The reason being, this skill actually has practical use on some maps

Wow! Very fascinating!

absolutely incredible video. I'm jealous of your analysis skills. Like seriously fucking blowing my mind. This is the sort of stuff I wish I could do at my computer.

i love your videos, please upload more

Would be interesting to see what happens when you go to 4 or more turns per jump. Wouldn't that using the same argument as going from 2 to 3 also improve time? You probably hit another barrier at some point, but when does that happen? Would probably be even harder for a human to execute too.

Loved it, thanks.

Amazing work! Damn, I need to get back to CPMA.

cool video. you're right that adding another directional change per jump increases speed, 2 strafes per jump is most common across flat terrain because more strafes in a given jump means more opportunities to have slightly less-than-perfect inputs which cost speed, increase total travel distance or both. autostrafe TAS tools/cheats simply change direction every server tick. ps i'm not a speedrunner so idk if they might have a different reason, just a casual bhop player

You're a genius.

absolute gem, shame this didn't take off.

This is fascinating....You should make a 3 minute version of this called "REVEALED! Who is faster: Quake Guy or Wild Cheetah?" and do a scale experiment of the 2 running in split screen...that's the viral video to pull in the audience, then add this video to the outro card, description etc.. so people get the quality behind the quantity, so to speak. You can do follow-ups like Quake Guy vs Doom Guy, Quake Guy vs a Chocobo, Quake Guy vs Corono Virus etc....(this is all tongue-in-cheek ofc)

You should use the number of strafes as a parameter so that your genetic algorithm has the potential to optimize its airpath and gain

Great stuff, I've wanted to see someone do something like this for at least 10 years :) e2m1 might be a good first non-trivial one to try?

Good. You've entertained me. Now make a video covering Slash's physics in Quake Champions :D

nice videos

Nice

Great vid but I really wish you had shown the 3-turn from first person view

This is so cool, amazing work. Are you planning to open source the code?

2021: it's time to improve on quake 1 speedrunning

Unless I have the biggest human brain, a 3-turn puts more moving parts on top of Power Bunnyhopping. I'm not saying it's impossible, for me I'm just getting started with Power Bunnyhopping. A 2-turn is already proven to have a lot of moving parts, but that may be the fact that I've burdened myself by learning the standard Bunnyhop with QuakeWorld Physics first. QuakeWorld Physics completely throws the forward key out the window when you land on the ground and makes movement as effective as your framerate is. I've had 8 seconds in 100m with QW-Physics, so, this might mean we've got a ways to go in Vanilla (maybe anyways).

How does the three turn strafe jump look from the players viewpoint?

I wish you did something similiar with VQ3 movement

If you want a better explanation on the strafejump speed acceleration techniques, I recommend watching half life speed runs with the scripts they use to gain maximum speed.

Is Carmack actually god though ? like.. he came here to make this game to show us that we're playing a game just like it Quantum phenomena are just data availability, why compute for noone etc.. Fucking legend keep it up :)

Is there a possibility of miniscule frame time variations tampering with the results? I know from experience that forcing higher frame rates significantly impacts the player's speed. Do WR entries always use fixed time steps?

Instead of genetic algorithms for reversing the inputs, how about a breadth first tree search starting from the first frame? I'm not familiar with the technical details, but I imagine after a few hundred frames all the previous inputs up to a certain point (or at least the high precision coordinates if they are truly ambiguous) would get "locked in". This would also solve the problem of monsters, switches etc. when applying the technique to more complex demos.

Hope the algorythm picks this one up

Do you have any videos of your/a 'humanized' bot completing a Defrag map? I've seen a non-humanized one during a Defrag tournament, but I have wanted to see one performing something that could potentially be done by a human (not cyborg.)

Disappointing that it took youtube two years to show this to me

ugh i'm too impatient to listen to the technicalness''''''... hahaha i remember learning bhop when it was brand new to cstrike... i'd be in the opponent's spawn before they were done buying weapons. i wish i had demos in order to share the sheer, ecstatic joy of the experience ♥

if you could do something like that for my 100m world record in quake3 (map name is un-dead!021), that would be great.

how do you make these videos :O

Is the client's camera roll value ever not 0 in quake?

why is quake 3 strafing so much diff than this?

isnt quake 1 10fps in netcode and demos by default??

I'm sorry but what does quantizing mean

ezPotat

this is some harry potter shit

Nobody! I said, NOBODY will ever tell me that Python is slow...

its 4 27 am for me and my last 2 woke braincells try to process what is going on. but you are insane.

this is the peek of nerd stuff

Watching an AI figure out what people figured out in the 90's is pretty hilarious.

I'm sorry but Genetic algorithm is absolute garbage. Not sure why you would choose it over a variety of alternatives.

Your mouth sounds are unbearable.

I don't know how the movement works in this game, but in Valve games the velocity is constant when in the air. This makes me think that it could be possible to get a faster time by just letting go of the controls, and just travel straight forwards once you've reached a high enough velocity where it would otherwise be hard to gain any more speed. Could be worth trying :)