Skipwalking
From Worms Knowledge Base
Early on, players discovered that if you rhythmically click the right mouse button while your Worm is walking, it can walk faster. Some people consider this to be cheating. Others feel that it is a legitimate skill, and a way to reduce the monotony of long walks. It is, however, generally agreed upon that skipwalking should be disallowed in Battle races.
Contents
How skipwalking works
The worm walking physics is rather complex. There are two basic phases to walking; an "expanding" phase and a "contracting" phase. During the latter phase, very little forward motion is acheived.
This can be exploited. Right-clicking causes the game to open the weapons panel. The panel immediately closes because of the arrow key being held down, but the upshot is that input is ignored for one frame (1/50 second). This causes the phase of the walk to be reset, and the slower "contracting" phase is skipped.
Practical aspects of skipwalking
The rate at which the right mouse button is clicked makes a big difference. Click too fast or too slowly, and the worm will actually advance more slowly. At best, skipwalking provides a 1.43× speed boost; jumping forward is a faster way to travel when the terrain allows it.
Because of the way skipwalking works, it would be theoretically possible to do so by holding an arrow key for 1/10 second, releasing it for 1/50 second, then pressing it again, etc. This would be useful, because right-clicking has no effect during a retreat. It is virtually impossible to do in practice; however, by holding one arrow key and tapping the opposite, a skipwalk can be acheived during retreat time (because in W:A, opposite arrow keys cancel each other out).
Speed comparison
- 1.00000× speed with 0.04 sec warmup - Normal Walking
- 1.00000× speed - Skipwalking slowdown threshold (2.84211 clicks/second; a slower rate yields slow walking)
- 1.00000× speed - Skipwalking slowdown threshold (6.05000 clicks/second; a faster rate yields slow walking)
- 1.14263× speed - Optimum Jumping up a 45° slope (period=0.94 sec)
- 1.43098× speed - Optimum Skipwalking (period=0.22 sec, 4.54545 clicks/second)
- 1.48148× speed with 0.04 sec warmup - Optimum Flipwalking (period=0.20 sec, 0.18 sec forward, one frame backward)
- 1.98402× speed - Nearly Optimum Jumping on a flat surface (period=1.32 sec)
- 2.00000× speed with 2/3 second warmup - Walking with Fast Walk utility
- 2.00030× speed - Optimum Jumping on a flat surface (period=1.3 sec)
- 2.32279× speed - Optimum Jumping down a 44.74° slope (period=1.78 sec)
Skipwalking interval speed comparison
- period=0.16 sec: 0.92593× speed
- period=0.18 sec: 1.18313× speed
- period=0.20 sec: 1.34259× speed
- period=0.22 sec: 1.43098× speed
- period=0.24 sec: 1.35031× speed
- period=0.26 sec: 1.24644× speed
- period=0.28 sec: 1.19048× speed
- period=0.30 sec: 1.14198× speed
- period=0.32 sec: 1.09954× speed
- period=0.34 sec: 1.03486× speed
- period=0.36 sec: 0.97737× speed
Skipwalking under Test Stuff V5
To Skipwalk with this mode enabled, you have two options, A) click the Right Mouse Button, or B) press the Up and/or Down Arrow Keys while walking.
Flipwalking
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W:A replay: Optimum flipwalking across a 616-pixel distance |
| Download · Info |
Like with skipwalking, to "flipwalk" one needs to press certain keys at certain intervals to increase the walk speed. Flipwalking is somewhat faster than skipwalking (see "Speed comparison" above). The technique for flipwalking comprises in "turning around" every 10th frame (9 frames of walking in one direction, 1 frame of walking in the other).
Flipwalking was discovered when the program BRSolver started using it to travel across flat surfaces after it was programmed to take into account all subtleties of the game's walking logic.
