Longjump: Questions and answers

what is the best mouse dpi for lj ? 400 800 or 1800 ? becouse dpi changes the mouse moving sens in air and not.

I am having some really strange problem. Ever since I got a g400 mouse to replace my Death Adder, my sync and gain on strafes has been really good, but my prestrafe almost never goes over 273.

I've tried practicing prestrafe over and over and I can't seem to get it consistently over 273. On other mice I've had, 274-276 pre was pretty effortless, except if you did a lot of strafes of course - then it gets harder. Now I can't even get 274 pre just doing the prestrafe trying as hard as I can.

Could be fatigue or slight injury Harley. For fine motor skills, most of the improvement occurs after the motions as brain cells and nerve endings grow. Training your lj skills is more about training your brain and peripheral nervous system than your fingers/hands. You have to rest them so that this is possible.

That's also why it is astonishing when these things happen, because you brain is confused about why it cannot produce the results it thinks it is. It is because it has lost control of the peripheral nervous system because of fatigue.

Theoretically you should only have to rest each day after practicing (and get good night's sleep), but if you've practiced to the point where you are super fatigued, a few days off may be necessary.

A good analogy to kz for me is piano, and perfecting your run on a map can be likened to perfecting a piano piece as it is about executing a series of difficult fine motor movements. Sometimes I find on pieces that are very challenging to play, after going at it very hard I suddenly lose all control and my hands give out, maybe even w/ some pain. I find that if I keep trying to practice, sometimes even the next day, my results are poor, so I find it best to take a few days rest or only play very slow and simple for a few days.

Hopefully after the break you will be much further than where you left off because your brain/peripheral nerves will develop, but I find these muscles tend to be unpredictable in their development.

Playing some simple kz maps is a good break from LJ that helps you round out your skills :)

Originally posted by Harley

Thanks for your reply, Cow, I also play the Piano, so I'm quite aware of that phenomenon. However, what makes me doubt that it's MY "fault" is the instant loss of sync. It happened literary from one jump to the next. I never experienced anything alike in my 12 year Piano career. Hence the desparation.

Well I guess, I just have to keep going. Too bad :S


Thanks again, Cow. Wish I could help you with your pre issue. Could you upload a demo maybe?

Sorry for the double post.

However having not to worry about my sync anymore, what do you think could I do to increase my distance?

2 Screens
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/631859938223929233/5D21037BE910AA63A13579C10E3FE62289F403AE/
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/631859938223938716/AAF919DEA0A70B96C39D0F113E7E170FB846789F/
1 Demo
http://www.sendspace.com/file/owr4jo

I know 6 strafes would definitely help, however I wanna stick with 5 strafes until I get a constant 250+ units and 253-254 every once in a while.


Edit: If anyone might experience sync problems as I did before: Check the ANGLE and key push (A in my case) of your second strafe... took me 2ish weeks to figure that out unfortunately :D

Hey guys. I would really appreciate any kind of help if some of you could help me. I have a few questions and I'd like to know your opinions. The first thing is is a keyboard that important for lj? The reason I'm asking this is that my 'WASD' keys are bit softer than the others, which made me think that the keys themselves are getting worse. Or not? I was about to buy a new keyboard because I have some old Genius. And I thought the keyboard is supposed to have keys that recoil back while pushing. It might not be really understandable but I'll try to make it clear so as you could understand. What I mean and wish is when you push the key it goes back much faster to the initial, primary condition as if it had some kind of a stronger spring or whatever it is called so you could push them faster. I hope you get it.

The second thing I wanted to ask is about strafing itself. Are strafes supposed to be quick and wide? Recently I practised my strafes to be kinda slower but wider, which gave me like 80-90 % of sync. At the same time i tried to make them abrupt so I could gain quite a large ms. But as appeared ms is not a significant influence on the distance, right?

The ljs there are with 6 strafes because it's kinda hard for me to make more than six. Though I have a demo of 254 lj with 7 strafes http://www.sendspace.com/file/w5jvpc but 7th strafe looks useless. Mostly the 7th strafe is like 0 when I try to do it. And also I have a problem with my 2nd strafe - its sync is always different, it's varied from 50-90%. I dunno how to fix it. So my question is should I pratise 6 or 7 strafes. If 6 than the time of the jump with 6 strafes involved is not relevant to the the time of the whole jump. I mean you have time just to move straight having done those 6 strafes.

And one more thing - I've been trying to jump 255 block a billion of times but never jumped it. I've watched quite a large number of demos that are very different. Some of them included only six strafes, which seemed amazing. So I had lots of attempts to jump it either with six or seven strafes because it feels rather different, you know. Very often six strafes are way more productive than seven. What is worth practising if it concerns 255 block? And also it turned out that the true distance of my 254 lj jump was not 255.1 or something as the stats showed on the demo but 254.8 I guess. What if my lj stats. is bugged and every time I had 255 stats. fail on the block was not the real 255?

I've read a lot about lj in general (the angle of the prestrafe, wide prestrafe, binding mouse2 +duck (which was rather helpful), unpushing 'A' or 'D' a bit earlier while doing the first strafe, mouse moving, the airtime, etc.) mostly based on CowOnCrack's posts. I just want to know what exactly I am doing wrong. I know my way of ljing is not constant, which might be kinda problematic but I hope you'll figure out my faults.
Anyway, I could probably find the answers in this thread. And I would, if the lj were not so individual. And as I said before any kind of help would be appreciated. So check my demos and I will be glad to get a piece of advice of any kind.

Originally posted by CowOnCrack

Hey guys. I would really appreciate any kind of help if some of you could help me. I have a few questions and I'd like to know your opinions. The first thing is is a keyboard that important for lj? The reason I'm asking this is that my 'WASD' keys are bit softer than the others, which made me think that the keys themselves are getting worse. Or not? I was about to buy a new keyboard because I have some old Genius. And I thought the keyboard is supposed to have keys that recoil back while pushing. It might not be really understandable but I'll try to make it clear so as you could understand. What I mean and wish is when you push the key it goes back much faster to the initial, primary condition as if it had some kind of a stronger spring or whatever it is called so you could push them faster. I hope you get it.

The way the keys react when pressing them can be called the 'action' of the keyboard, and it is important. Keyboard's with bad action can make it hard to press the keys quickly, which means it is hard to do more than a certain amount of strafes. Of course, coordination in the fingers can overcome most problems and most people can be good on any keyboard. The primary obstacle to doing more than around 6 strafes is coordination. Also, if you make you strafes too big, it is simply too difficult to do more strafes. There are limits, and people that do 8+ strafes usually compromise by making them smaller and adopting a different technique that uses less muscles (like fore-arm wiggling).

Still you should try to find a keyboard that is comfortable and has the appropriate action for you. Comfort is a huge thing - if your hands and fingers aren't comfortable then fatigue, tension, and stress will ruin you. If you've ever played the piano then you can tell the difference between good action and bad action. If you haven't, then I will explain it like this - it is how fast you press the key down, not how hard, that determines how loud the note is on a piano. So if you have keys that get stuck on the way down, or that vary in how much strength to break the friction from key to key, it's extremely hard to get a good and consistent sound.

The second thing I wanted to ask is about strafing itself. Are strafes supposed to be quick and wide? Recently I practised my strafes to be kinda slower but wider, which gave me like 80-90 % of sync. At the same time i tried to make them abrupt so I could gain quite a large ms. But as appeared ms is not a significant influence on the distance, right?

Basically it works like this. If you can do big huge strafes but do them super quick, then that's really good (freestyler comes to mind). This jump you did (a very good jump btw) is more or less an example of this:

LJ Distance: 254.080764 Maxspeed: 344.944732 (68.823) Prestrafe: 276.121368 Strafes: 6 Sync: 90
1 12.455 0.000 15.2 90
2 12.681 0.791 18.0 92
3 13.230 0.546 18.1 92
4 12.249 0.377 19.4 85
5 11.796 0.620 18.0 92
6 6.409 0.562 11.1 88

But achieving this kind of gain/airtime with 7-8 strafes is beyond the limits of almost anybody (except maybe freestyler on his 257 block!), so a tradeoff must be made to get the "most" out of the gain you can routinely achieve. The problem is that the wider you make them, the harder it becomes to do them quickly enough where you don't lose distance to them being "too wide". This happens when the gain you are getting occurs over such a time and space that you are merely maintaining your speed (or even losing it), not increasing it. Here is freestyler's jump:

Distance: 257.737121 MaxSpeed: 340.034454 (63.696) PreStrafe: 276.337585 Strafes: 8 Sync: 85
1 10.170 0.000 12.3 87
2 11.861 0.426 15.0 90
3 9.372 1.002 13.6 88
4 9.497 0.148 12.3 88
5 9.466 0.481 15.0 90
6 7.322 0.000 12.3 100
7 5.402 0.000 10.9 87
8 0.604 0.149 8.2 33

This trade off is to make them around small to medium in size and focus on doing them as fast as possible. If you aimed for maybe 11 gain on the first, 8-10 gain on the next 5, and 5-8 gain on the 7th, then you would be able to achieve higher distance - in the 256-257 range, with around identical Max Speed, just like the jump shown here.

Max speed is the highest speed you reached during the jump, so it's a good general indicator of possible distance. However, if you reached this top speed at the end of your jump, then you won't go as far as you did if you reached that top speed at the beginning. Even though there is a maximum speed you reached, your speed is changing in the air as you fly along and the earlier you reach your max speed and the longer you maintain it, the better for distance. Let's look at your jump and how fast you gained your speed compared to freestyler's jump:

First 2 strafes:
freestyler - 21.9 / 27.3 - = .80
icke - 25 / 33.2 - = .75

First 3 strafes:
freestyler - 31.2 / 40.9 - = .76
icke- 38.2 / 51.3 = .74

This is a ratio of gain over airtime for the first two strafes and three strafes of your jump compared with freestylers. Freestyler is getting more gain in a shorter period of time. These aren't huge differences, of course, but what a lot of people forget when LJ'ing is that the difference between 254.0 and 257 isn't very big either, at least not according to the game engine. It's the same as the difference between 245 and 248. Of course it seems way different to us, not because of the engine, but because the 250+ range is where human limits get tested.

That's why airtime is important, because the best thing to do is get those first 5 strafes in super fast, then do a very smooth well-synced 6th strafe (which will keep you moving at that top speed.) Or if you are doing 7 strafes, do the first 6 quick, and the last one slow, etc. As long as you are syncing your strafes, you don't really 'lose' speed in the air - there is no air friction in CS. So if you get that top speed you will more or less keep it or increase it if you keep strafing with good sync. If your sync sucks then it is possible to lose a bit of speed. Obviously when you hit the ground you lose it all, which gravity will eventually cause you do to.

The ljs there are with 6 strafes because it's kinda hard for me to make more than six. Though I have a demo of 254 lj with 7 strafes http://www.sendspace.com/file/w5jvpc but 7th strafe looks useless. Mostly the 7th strafe is like 0 when I try to do it. And also I have a problem with my 2nd strafe - its sync is always different, it's varied from 50-90%. I dunno how to fix it. So my question is should I pratise 6 or 7 strafes. If 6 than the time of the jump with 6 strafes involved is not relevant to the the time of the whole jump. I mean you have time just to move straight having done those 6 strafes.

It takes a lot of time to be comfortable with doing more strafes. Usually people will eventually discover a technique that works for them. Basically, there are some natural impediments to doing more strafes - bad accessories (you brought up keyboard earlier, but included here is also your mouse, your software settings, etc.), a bad technique, or simply not enough time and experience. As far as the technique part goes, the most important thing to remember is that the brain can be incredibly wasteful in performing even the smallest physical tasks. If you are learning how to LJ chances are you are using way too many muscles in doing it, and also you have muscles that are working against each other. There are two kinds of muscles generally - big slow muscles, and small fast muscles. You want to use the latter more than the former.

Again with the piano analogy - the ultimate goal of piano technique is to perform quick movements with minimal tension and effort.

This quote is from a book on piano technique:

"For even the simplest tasks, the untrained brain uses most of the muscles in the body. And if the task is difficult, the brain tends to lock the entire body in a mass of tensed muscles. In order to relax, you must make a conscious effort to shut down all unnecessary muscles. This is not easy because it goes against the natural tendencies of the brain. You need to practice relaxation just as much as moving the fingers to play the keys. Relaxing does not mean to "let go of all muscles"; it means that the unnecessary ones are relaxed even when the necessary ones are working full tilt, which is a coordination skill that requires a lot of practice."

Think about what muscles you are using when you LJ. Do you have to hold your arm up while doing it? Guess what - that means you have to activate a very large amount of muscles without even moving the mouse - the muscles required to hold your arm up. And you will need those muscles all while you LJ. This is why pianists sit far enough from the bench and high enough that they don't have to waste energy holding their arms up to play - their hands naturally rest on the keys.

And one more thing - I've been trying to jump 255 block a billion of times but never jumped it. I've watched quite a large number of demos that are very different. Some of them included only six strafes, which seemed amazing. So I had lots of attempts to jump it either with six or seven strafes because it feels rather different, you know. Very often six strafes are way more productive than seven. What is worth practising if it concerns 255 block? And also it turned out that the true distance of my 254 lj jump was not 255.1 or something as the stats showed on the demo but 254.8 I guess. What if my lj stats. is bugged and every time I had 255 stats. fail on the block was not the real 255?

It is possible to do 255 block with 6 strafes - it requires very fast and decently wide strafes, with the first 5 done quickly and the last one done slowly. For higher blocks though it is practically impossible, which is why all 256 and 257 blocks are done with 7-8.

I've read a lot about lj in general (the angle of the prestrafe, wide prestrafe, binding mouse2 +duck (which was rather helpful), unpushing 'A' or 'D' a bit earlier while doing the first strafe, mouse moving, the airtime, etc.) mostly based on CowOnCrack's posts. I just want to know what exactly I am doing wrong. I know my way of ljing is not constant, which might be kinda problematic but I hope you'll figure out my faults.
Anyway, I could probably find the answers in this thread. And I would, if the lj were not so individual. And as I said before any kind of help would be appreciated. So check my demos and I will be glad to get a piece of advice of any kind.

You seem like you are doing pretty well with LJ. Your airtime is actually pretty good - your first strafe is pretty fast. I think the only thing you have to do is recognize that there will be a trade off and that your first few strafes will have to be a bit smaller so you can do more of them. There seems to be a hidden 'bonus' in the game for doing more strafes. For some reason a two very similar jumps, but one done with 7 and the other done with 6, then 7 strafe jump seems to go farther. This could be a result of everything else discussed, or there could be some additional bonus. In any case, you should make your first strafes less wide and concentrate on adding a 7th strafe.

It will take some time, because it may go against a natural 'style' that you have developed. That's probably the hardest part of LJ - we all have different setups that result in us developing different styles and approaches, but there are but a few approaches that result in those uber distances. Maybe that's why freestyler is so good - his name suggests that he can change his styles around when he wants to!

Hey, Harley. I'm pretty sure your explication of the last-strafe-matter as you call it sounds rather logical. But I think the answer had been already given:[blockquote]As long as you are syncing your strafes, you don't really 'lose' speed in the air - there is no air friction in CS. So if you get that top speed you will more or less keep it or increase it if you keep strafing with good sync. If your sync sucks then it is possible to lose a bit of speed. Obviously when you hit the ground you lose it all, which gravity will eventually cause you do to.[/blockquote]
That was probably a thing I shouldn't have asked CowOnCrack :S My fault, sorry. Anyway, thanks also for your reply, Harley. For some reason I didn't come to such conclusion as you did.
Thanks for telling me my English is good, Harley. But you probably know what German English is (not sure if it exists tho). It's not two language systems stuck together with different lexical and grammatical means and norms of the languages, but it's English influenced by typical mistakes the Germans do for example, something connected with perception of the world and lingvoculture. So, Russian English is something I wish I got rid of, because it sounds terrible. Your English is also rather good btw :)

Originally posted by icke

One more thing I seem to know is the part of the fingers with the help of which one pushes the keys. It is not shown in the picture if I'm not mistaken, or at least it is present partially. The idea is to use this area http://www.practice-like-a-player.com/images/the_sakari_strike_zone_0wcr.jpg but not pulps if you know what I mean. I know, it's from a guitar playing source but the idea is common.

Anyway, I don't really think that the technique of playing piano is similar to ljing. And what about the wrist? Is it supposed to be a support or the hand should lean on its fingers only?

But apparently besides this, the keyboard is the key thing. I'm glad you got my idea about it.

If you don't mind I'd like to know your opinion of the last strafe of Freestyler's jump. It actually looks useless. Do you think it would be the same distance stats w/o it?

I know there already exists one in kreedz tutorial section here but it goes with nothing but a pratcical material. Players need theory. It's rather annoying to look for the answers in the thread of 30+ pages, you know, and if this guide was somewhat systematic concerning every approach and aspect to the lj, it would be way more productive.