Longjump: Questions and answers

if someone can help me with my strafe problem, i`ll be greatfully. Here's some DEMO's with different positions of the mouse. please if some of you have some time to take a look at them and tell me which are better from lj/lj2 and cj/cj2. Thanks

Originally posted by jack frog

How can I reduce the airtime on my first strafe? I keep getting 20%+
I've tried to do my 2nd strafe earlier or shortening my first strafe, but this gives me even 35% airtime wtf

I want to post a method here that almost anyone in this thread can use for almost any LJ problem. I call it the 'break it down, build, and re-build' method.

LJ TROUBLESHOOTING METHOD: BREAK IT DOWN, BUILD, AND REBUILD

If you are running into some LJ anomaly, or if you have a certain goal (such as, reduce the airtime of the first strafe to <20), you need to be able to analyze what you are doing and first break it down.

If there is an anomaly in your jump, such as 0 on a strafe, or really high airtime on a strafe, trying to correct it with your current form is hopeless. An LJ is such a quick fine motor movement that you can't possibly hope to mentally alter some tiny part of it while you execute it. Anyone who has tried this knows that as soon as you focus on one problem, another appears.

An LJ has these components:

1) Lining up. You must start from the same place every time. Don't just choose a random spot - watch some demos and look at the different starting spots good LJ'ers use. Don't just pick one you like or pick one randomly either - try to find one that you feel comfortable using. This is because you will start here every time - you need to make the correct decision here.

2) Prestrafe - this needs to be almost flawless every time. The motion doesn't take very long to get down. You want 274+ on every jump, don't settle for less. The difference between 270 and 275 is at least one unit in distance.

3) Takeoff - you need to takeoff looking at the same angle every time, NOT straight. Why an angle? I will explain this in #4 and #5. Another important thing about taking off is that you must let go of forward right as you jump. Too early, and your prestrafe speed will plummet and you will fall like a stone. Too late and the sync on your first strafe will be reduced. Too late is obviously less evil (80-90 sync on the first strafe isn't THAT big of a deal) but don't settle for it! And let us not forget that other very important part of takeoff - edge! Training with an LJ plugin that shows your edge (bjormi's uq_jumpstats has this and is available for everyone here: http://xtreme-jumps.eu/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?223567) is extremely helpful. Learn to jump as late as possible before you build up habits of jumping too early.

4) First strafe - the first strafe is the most important, by far! If you make it too wide and/or too slow, your distance will suffer tremendously. DO NOT TAKE OFF AT TOO BIG AN ANGLE! The angle that you take off at should be noticeable, but pretty small. If you take off at too much of an angle, you are training yourself to have a gigantic and slow first strafe!

5) Even strafes - what I said in #3 is now explained. You must take off at an angle so that when you do your first strafe, you are covering a small distance just to line up with the edge in front of you. Then you strafe over the edge, come back the other way to where you took off, and keep going back and forth like that. With the very last strafe you finish on the edge. Imagine a line connecting one edge of the block to the opposite edge. Your strafes are like a sine wave or zigzags on that line. If you keep your strafes even on this imaginary line, you will jump as straight as possible - this can make the difference between landing a big block and missing it. For example, if you are doing 255 block and you can barely manage 255.x stats, jumping as straight as possible (as well as edge) becomes very important.

With regard to airtime, try to make the amount of time spent on each strafe approximately equal (with the exception of the last strafe, see #6).

6) Quality strafes - this part can't entirely be separated from #5 but I put it here separately. Since you have a limited amount of airtime and there are limits to how fast anyone can strafe, your strafes should be the best quality possible. What is quality, you ask? Don't get confused - all this means is that the strafes at the beginning of your jump are more important than the ones at the end. As far as gain goes, you want your first few strafes to be the biggest. The rest of the strafes should be smaller and smaller. For example, 12/11/10/9/8/8/5 are extremely good gain numbers for a 7 strafe jump. As far as airtime goes, you want your last strafe to last the longest. So how are your first strafes, gain, and airtime related?

Simple: if you are gaining most of your speed at the beginning of your jump, the longer you will be at your MaxSpeed and the further you will go. If a car gets up to 60 km per hour in one second and travels five seconds, it will go further than a car that takes three full seconds to get to 60km per hour and travels 5 seconds total. So you should be getting most of your gain as fast as possible, which means strafing faster and having the biggest gain strafes first. This way you are gaining speed faster and earlier which carries through your jump.

So the two parts of quality are: make your strafes smaller and smaller from first to last, and make all but the last strafe quick.

There is also one more extremely minor part - make your strafes smooth, not jerky, to minimize the amount of speed lost. In practice everyone will lose speed on some of their strafes and every WR block has speed lost somewhere - it is mostly unavoidable and barely affects distance at all.

7) Landing - crouching as late as possible becomes pretty important in getting very high distances. In a perfect situation you stop strafing before you crouch, and crouch at the very end. In practice to get that 7th or 8th strafe in you will be holding crouch during that strafe.

Now that the LJ has been broken down, identify where your problem is. Then STOP JUMPING. Don't keep jumping incorrectly. This is going to suck, but go back to whatever part you are doing wrong and re-learn it. For example, if you keep getting 270 pre, stop all your jumps and practice your prestrafe until you get 274+ on EVERY JUMP. Its OK to have a few fails in like 50 jumps, but that's it. Then start adding the rest of the elements, piece by piece, until you are back where you were.

When you reach #5/#6, add one strafe at a time. Let's say your issue is that the airtime of your first strafe sucks. Stop jumping with anything but two strafes. Do two strafe LJ's until the airtime on your first strafe is under 20% and your second is 80%+. Then add a third strafe, and this time make your first two under 20% (you are aiming for doing 6 or 7 quick strafes eventually, after all.) All the while, practice perfection in the other elements. Practice evenness and quality on every strafe - don't add another one until you are completely solid with the number you are currently doing.

Also, THE FOLLOWING IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: even WITHIN steps you can break things down! Don't aim for <20% airtime on your first strafe with your very first jump! Aim for maybe 1% faster than you usually do it. Aim to make it just a tad bit quicker. When you can do that comfortably, try to challenge yourself and shave off another 1%. Things MUST be done this way or you will attempt to go from 35% airtime to 20% with your first 50 jumps, fail, and conclude it is impossible. Use those 50 jumps to shave off just 1% and you will not only see progress, but you will be on track to your goal. What is a thousand mile journey if not a series of steps?

This method may seem obsessive-compulsive, but it is THE ONLY WAY, I repeat, THE ONLY WAY for people (or at least, mere LJ mortals) to correct problems. It is simply way too difficult to focus on more than one tiny problem at a time when correcting bad form. This method will let you focus exclusively on exactly the problem that is giving you trouble with everything else cut out. You will spend most of your time on just this problem.

But doesn't re-learning how to LJ over and over take FOREVER? Hardly!

If you actually follow this method, you will find that building and re-building your jump will take less and less time, and your jumping will become more and more solid until it is near-perfect. It will become very easy to fix your problem and do the accompanying parts - the parts you already can do well will take no effort and you can focus all of your mental energy slowly but surely correcting the issue. This is probably hundreds of times more efficient than trying to focus on a tiny issue in the middle of a 7 strafe jump. No one said mastering LJ is easy work - most top LJ'ers took years of training to jump those big blocks.

So if you are having a major problem, I recommend you give this method a try before asking in this thread for some metaphysical explanation.

LJ Distance: 253.119033 Maxspeed: 340.673492 (66.355) Prestrafe: 274.317779 Strafes: 7 Sync: 87
1 14.518 0.000 21.9 92
2 10.805 0.000 13.7 90
3 12.792 0.000 17.8 84
4 9.132 0.380 12.3 88
5 8.927 0.297 13.7 80
6 7.558 0.075 12.3 88
7 2.621 0.378 8.2 85

i know that my problem is the air time so i wana know how to reduce it .. i tried fast small wide fast slow wide every kind of strafe and i keep getting high air time on first strafe .. ? You guys have some tip and can u help me ? P.S. Its on 100aa

i tried ur technique and yeah somehow it worked bur i allways had issues with airtime on the first strafe :S + i wiggle the mouse so fast and i try to make the last strafe airtime highest but .... :D problem

yes that was some rly useful info CowOnCrack, i hope some of my friends can take use of that information :) thanks.

Hello got a jump two years and now I started getting good stats but less for effec jump I forget you an example:

Distance: 248.490447 MAXSPEED: 325.701538 (51.558) PreStrafe: 274.142974 Strafes: 6 Sync: 93
1 12,556 0,000 27.5 100
2 11,946 0,000 18.4 84
3 9,928 0,000 16.5 100
4 9,684 0,000 16.5 91
5 6,877 0,000 17.9 92
6 0,564 0,000 12.5 90
What could be the problem? Want to mention that right does not jump crooked jump.

is this thread only for lj problems? or could it be for dcj problems too?

Originally posted by xERAU;*

Is this a good lj in your opinion, what should I do better?

turned of mouse acceleration? Im using cheesefix/cplmousefix + turned of w7 acceleration + removed acceleration in cs + turned of acceleration in the mouse itself. Just to be sure ;) xD