When did straferunning become common knowledge?

[kuchitsu]

Sometimes when playing very old maps I'm not sure whether a pit is supposed to be possible to cross or not. I usually abstain from doing such jumps unless I really can't find another way to progress. I wonder when did this stuff become common knowledge? Should I feel free to do strafejumps when playing 1998 wads, for example?

[Kira]

Hell Revealed map11 has a part where you need it, so it must have been common knowledge by 1997 at least.

[hex11]

If you don't mean SR50, then I'm pretty sure a lot of players quickly figured out you can run faster with strafe, just as a result of goofing off (like shooting rockets and running behind them and off to the side a little). I knew about this before getting Internet access, and also had a feeling there was something weird going on with walls because running alongside them sometimes felt faster than usual.
I didn't know about WASD+mouse stuff until reading about it on Usenet though. Played strictly with the default keybindings (and no mouse) until then. That makes it really hard to figure out SR50...

[Phml]

^ Sounds about right. SR50 would be impossible to know for most of us pre-internet, but I think just about anyone must have had that moment of dodging a fireball with a strafe left + move forward, feel faster for some strange reason, or making a jump you wouldn't normally have been able to do; and then comes finding a room where you can run a straight line for a few seconds to test your speed, and hey, what do you know, strafing goes faster.

It made intuitive sense too because you had a lot more turn-based square grid games at the time, and in many of them a diagonal move counted as the same value as a lateral move, despite moving you a greater distance for the same reasons as Doom. While this was harder to see in a real time "3D" game, once you experienced the speed difference it became easy to work backwards to realise what's going on.

[Arctangent]

I feel like crossing a pit with straferunning that you couldn't with normal running should normally feel like you're doing something the author didn't expect, if you're not playing something that's meant to train you to use straferunning anyway.

That said, if the point of what you're doing is basically speedrunning anyway, the author's intentions are pretty irrelevant.

[kuchitsu]

Hmm. But according to the Doom Wiki, which cites John Romero, it took them almost a full year to find out about straferunning. And that was a team of developers, people who were supposed to find everything strange about the game. So maybe it isn't as obvious as it seems to us now.

I actually don't remember how I found out about it. I think in childhood I didn't have "strafe left\right" buttons, instead I had to hold Alt and one of the turning buttons. Maybe it never crossed my mind to press ↑ at the same time. Maybe it would make the keyboard go beep beep.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

If you watch the Iwad demos you'll see why it took them a while to figure it out. Movement style wise.

[VGamingJunkie]

Ironically, I thought strafe running was required to get into the third level's secret level and just had to keep doing it until I got it right. The concept of shooting a rocket against my face to propel myself into that enclosure hadn't occurred to me.

[Doomkid]

I think its been known since the initial years of Doom, as there are several 1995-1996 dwango maps that require straferunning to cross gaps, get out of acid in time, etc etc. (edit: To clarify, I'm talking about sr40, not sr50)

Metroid, are you talking about the well in the Gantlet? I never knew that was the intended method! I think this was the first thing that taught me straferunning exists, getting in that damn thing was very satisfying though.

[Use]

Like hex11 said, most of us probably discovered this on our own. From my own experience I recall specifically in map19 of Doom2, which gives you plenty of room to run, chasing my own rockets. This was long before I was engaging with other Doom players online.

[Graf Zahl]

kuchitsu said:

Hmm. But according to the Doom Wiki, which cites John Romero, it took them almost a full year to find out about straferunning. And that was a team of developers, people who were supposed to find everything strange about the game. So maybe it isn't as obvious as it seems to us now.

Good joke. So how come that the game not only contains such movement weirdness but also several serious glitches that were far more obvious, even in the IWAD maps, if the developers were 'supposed' to find this stuff? Reality looks a bit different: Developers are often the people least likely to find problems in their code because they have their own working patterns and tend to miss things outside these patterns.

[Devalaous]

Graf Zahl said:

Good joke. So how come that the game not only contains such movement weirdness but also several serious glitches that were far more obvious, even in the IWAD maps, if the developers were 'supposed' to find this stuff? Reality looks a bit different: Developers are often the people least likely to find problems in their code because they have their own working patterns and tend to miss things outside these patterns.

Hence why testers are hired to put their code to the test and find such flaws

[Graf Zahl]

Having worked in software development for 22 years I have experienced the average quality of testers. In short: You get what you pay for and QA is an expense where most accountants try to save. Which is not surprising considering how work intensive good testing is.