Are you using the cgaz HUD?

[dqopb]

Of course everyone tried playing without it. In and beyond defrag.
The thing is, if you want to max out, cgazhud gives you a better chance than relying on your blind feel. Because it is more accurate than the muscle memory.

Arcaon, are you saying you don't use snaphud? I had an interlock with gnj where we discussed if it is possible to guess whether a player uses snaphud or not by watching his demos. And I was ready to bet you do use it! In comparison to other players who don't use snaphud or even cgazhud, you make absolutely no mistakes on the snapzones. And there is sometimes a well distinguishable switch from one to another neighboring snapzone in your demos.
You don't use it?

[Timothy]

The thing is, if you want to max out, cgazhud gives you a better chance than relying on your blind feel. Because it is more accurate than the muscle memory.

I don't know. I feel like when you play at a decent level it's more about hitting the right angle instantaneously. cgaz hud doesn't show you the angle until after you switched strafe side. If you have to correct yourself after looking at the hud and realizing your angle is off then it's already too late. These are mistakes players like Arcaon or Hades rarely make, which makes me believe it's more about muscle memory.

I might be wrong here so I'd like to read what a good strafer thinks about this.

[dqopb]

No. I'm a poor strafer, but it does help me. Why can't it help pro strafers having better reaction and muscle memory?
Not always I watch the hud, I switch to the map itself often too.

But when you train the same few jumps, e.g. on pads or some specific part of a map, then gazhud helps a lot. You don't need to pay big attention to the environment around, and hud becomes more important to pay attention to. This is what makes your muscles remember the right angle in the first place. And there is no delay in reaction then.

[Arcaon]

Arcaon, are you saying you don't use snaphud? I had an interlock with gnj where we discussed if it is possible to guess whether a player uses snaphud or not by watching his demos. And I was ready to bet you do use it! In comparison to other players who don't use snaphud or even cgazhud, you make absolutely no mistakes on the snapzones. And there is sometimes a well distinguishable switch from one to another neighboring snapzone in your demos.
You don't use it?

Lol, so you were "gnj's friend". If that's true, that's pretty cool! You should probably compare me to good players who are confirmed to use snaphud, as it's probable that their snapzone alignment trumps mine.

I don't know. I feel like when you play at a decent level it's more about hitting the right angle instantaneously. cgaz hud doesn't show you the angle until after you switched strafe side. If you have to correct yourself after looking at the hud and realizing your angle is off then it's already too late. These are mistakes players like Arcaon or Hades rarely make, which makes me believe it's more about muscle memory.

I might be wrong here so I'd like to read what a good strafer thinks about this.

I tried playing without cgaz hud on a strafewhore-anglefinding map, and I actually beat my record reasonably quickly, but I noticed that I had to reset more runs because I randomly missed an angle and lost out on a bunch of acceleration. So it's definitely a consistency thing for me. After all, it's a pixel-wide difference between great accel and zero accel.

Edit: I just downloaded a snaphud engine and analyzed my demos. It seems like the most overrated thing ever, as (if I'm understanding the thing correctly) most of the hud is the snapzone, except for some small spots, and I didn't see any detectable difference in acceleration between them.

On the other hand, I genuinely seemed to avoid those small spots for some reason. Interesting.

[rOOt]

No cgaz, I do not know how to read it. CFG is quite default as well, except for the OB detector and angles for plasma. But then again, I suck.

[khetti]

It's 2014, are we still super serious about which huds are cheating?
You bet we are!

Use or understanding of the huds is optional, tons of people strafe fine by trial-and-error, or by watching others.

In my opinion their real value is for those who intuit that they can't fully utilize the physics for reasons other than the accuracy of their performance.

One feature of any strafe run is that the player keeps their yaw at an angle that gets wider relative their move direction as speed increases.
Most strafe tutorials explain this and little more, and people are happy to practice this until they reach their personal limit.

That limit can be quite high, but at some point they might suspect that more practice won't close the gap between their times and the fastest.
The huds won't do that for free, but they are a fair compromise between terminally stratified competition and requiring that everyone debug the game.

The snaphud (at least the versions I've seen) shows only the zones of the different accel values.
It is a good idea to know those values and to have an idea how they contribute to your velocity, the hud doesn't show that (although it's not hard to add).

Often a snapzone with a low value gives the best accel.
Sometimes you might even use an angle >90 (which in unsnapped-quake-universe would decelerate you) to gain speed.

It's not as simple as memorizing some static angles to always avoid.
Huds wont save you here, but some investigation will.

There's also CPM physics, weapon knockback, etc about which the defrag huds say nothing.

I forgot what my point was.

[BerserK]

I should write something too.

Never was/have been/will.

[dqopb]

Often a snapzone with a low value gives the best accel.
Sometimes you might even use an angle >90 (which in unsnapped-quake-universe would decelerate you) to gain speed.

Yes, and snaphud shows that. Whilst the gazhud on its own doesn't tell you that.

It's not as simple as memorizing some static angles to always avoid.
Huds wont save you here, but some investigation will.

Totally agree. But once you DO the investigation AND figure out a technique/route, huds may help to improve the performance by just showing where to aim. Providing YOU figured out the way to improve. You see, seeing where to aim is more accurate than feeling where to aim.

There's also CPM physics, weapon knockback, etc about which the defrag huds say nothing.

CPM-specific hud is harder to implement. I mean I can't think of what it might look like. And the fullbeat cpm works well with gazhud and snaphud.
What for weapon knockback, there are viewangles.. Hitbox edges might help to visualize things too.

[Arcaon]

It's 2014, are we still super serious about which huds are cheating?
You bet we are!

I think we're reading different threads

[TittenIgnition]

There is cg_drawBBox, which shows the player's bounding box. To be able to display that for every entity (rockets, grenades, plasma) would be pretty cool, though in the end pretty damn useless. Aren't rockets 1u in width or something? All weapons can fit through some pretty small spaces, much smaller than their model/sprite.

Also, what would one need for a CPM-HUD? Gazhud already has standard strafe helper, and due to the way CPM works, air control accel/decel/effectual zones are basically where you would start to decelerate in VQ3.