Surfing in TF2

I've been surfing for a good couple of years, so I'll tell you all I know.

First off, I'll assume you have default key bindings (aka, WASD). Secondly, I would advise you to bind a key to kill, since you'll end up in jail a lot to start with, and that doesn't really help you as far as getting better goes.

**Section 1 (the basics)**

OK, first off I'll lay out the basics of moving. For the purpose of this section, assume everything I say is true, and inviolate. What I say here is NOT true and inviolate, but it will get you on the right track, and basic maps should be possible. I will tell you about the catches in a later section

I'll make on thing clear, too. Surfing is all about energy, be it kinetic, or potential. You can transfer potential energy to kinetic and vice versa through clever manipulation of the ramps. If you imagine your total energy as being your kinetic and potential energy combined, and this is a number, your sole aim is to make sure that number never drops, or at least to minimise the amount it drops. Energy can be lost from colliding with a surface, turning too fast, and other mechanisms.

First off, you must get on to a ramp. A "ramp" as they are known is what you referred to as the "triangle thing". You simply walk/fall/jump onto them from spawn in 99% of cases. In general it's preferable to jump onto a ramp, because it means you fall from a little higher, and so have a little more speed at the bottom. Once you're about to land on the ramp you need to make sure you don't fall off it. This is achieved by strafing in to the ramp (i.e. pressing D when the ramp is to your right, and A when the ramp is to your left). You must never EVER press S, as you will lose all your speed, and you will fall. You must also never press W, since that cancels out the strafe, meaning you fall down since there's nothing holding you on to the ramp. If you do all that then you should be able to get to the bottom of your first ramp, which leads me on to the next part.

Turning is quite similar to staying on the ramp. Never press W or S, as the same rules still apply. To turn left, you strafe left (A) and smoothly moth your mouse to the left. To turn right you do the exact opposite. Turning too fast will lead to a loss of speed, which is undesirable in most situations. How fast is "too fast" depends on the server, but you get a feel for what you can get away with after a while. If you turn your mouse in the opposite direction to the key you're holding then only your point of view will change - your character will still carry on moving in exactly the same direction. Pressing W while in midair has no effect provided you're not trying to turn (if you are trying to turn then it will simply cancel out the strafe key, meaning the turn has no effect).

Now comes jumping. Sometimes it is necessary to gain air to reach another ramp. In order to do this you must turn in to the middle of the ramp. Obviously given the shape of the ramp, the closer you are to the centre the higher you are. By moving to the centre from the outside you will climb the ramp, and turn some of your speed through both horizontal axis into speed through the vertical axis, and in doing so you can shoot off the top and jump. The same rule as before still apply though, in that turning too fast will slow you down. Once you're in the air you needn't press A or D unless you need to change direction.

Finally comes landing. The main thing you have to consider when landing is the angle at which you hit the ramp. As an abstraction, imagine the ramp is a table. You are a ball which does not bounce. If you throw the ball straight down at the table, and hit it squarely then it will lose all its speed and go nowhere. If you throw it at an angle to the table, then only some of the energy is lost, and the ball will still roll. Your aim is to make that angle so fine that you essentially glide up against the ramp, and retain as much energy as possible. In practice this usually results in landing on top of the ramp, swooping down to the bottom, and then flicking back up at the end in order to jump on to the next ramp.

It is also necessary to understand that the source engine uses semi realistic physics. It's realistic in some ways, but obviously not in others, otherwise surfing would be impossible. One way in which it is realistic is how centripetal force acts. If you go round a corner, then there will be a force pushing you up the ramp. How big this force is depends on your speed and how tightly you turn. When this force is large enough, or the angle of the ramp is shallow enough, you may find that you slide up to the outside of the ramp in turning. This can be countered by pressing the opposite key to what you usually would, and turning the mouse in the same direction as normal. In doing so you're effectively turning a corner like you would while turning in the air. On rare occasions it is possible to go round a corner without pressing any buttons, but this is only when the force acting on you is roughly enough to cancel out gravity pulling you down.

**Section 2 (advanced)**

This section is probably going to be slightly jumbled, since it's less concrete, and there’s a lot which just becomes intuition. I'd liken it to walking. There's a lot to knowing how to walk, and it's very complicated, but at the same time I'd be hopeless at trying to explain how to do it.

OK, so I'll start off with a quick and easy one; surfing on your head. Some maps will include upside down ramps that work much the same as a loop the loop on a rollercoaster. They're almost always curved so that you can stick to them. Surfing on your head works exactly the same as regular surfing. Turning is identical, and turning into the middle of the ramp will push you away from it (in this case down to the floor).

Secondly, remember where I said the previous section was inviolate? Yeah, well I lied. In actual fact it's entirely possible to surf backwards, or sideways, or even diagonally. The one thing you MUST always do is to strafe into the ramp. This will hold you in place. The only one which is a direct mirror of surfing forwards is surfing backwards (while this might seem "obvious", there's more to it than meets the eye). For the purposes of explaining, imagine you're following behind someone doing what I say, that way it will be clear which direction I'm referring to. Anyway, in order to surf backwards you must strafe into the ramp as normal. To turn left (again, this is "left" from the point of view of someone following you), you must hold down D and turn your mouse left. Turning right is a direct mirror. In this case, pressing W will bring you to a complete stop, and pressing S will cancel out your turns like W does facing forward. Surfing sideways works in much the same way, except you either walk backwards or forwards into the ramp. Air control while moving sideways is another issue, though. From what I can tell, the source engine treats left and right differently from back and forward, meaning that when moving sideways, pressing W or S will not necessarily allow you to turn. When surfing sideways, A and D become the buttons you must never press. Surfing diagonally is kind of an oddball, you must press a combination of keys (e.g. W and D) in order to face the ramp diagonally and still face it. As a side note, this is possible because the maximum walk speed in the source engine is a scalar, and not a vector, meaning that your maximum speed is constant whether you're walking forwards or diagonally (simple Pythagoras, (X^2+Y^2+Z^2)^0.5). Air control while moving diagonally is more or less impossible, because you're holding two keys at once, thus cancelling out the turn. In practice if you want to surf diagonally you will only be able to do so while on the ramps, when in the air you will have to turn yourself some other direction.

Surf maps will often contain boost regions, teleports and secrets. This is a common element of game play. The normal way surf maps work is that if you fall off the ramp then you get sent to jail (there is sometimes a way out of jail, or a release mechanism, but you usually die there). If you finish the map then you usually have the privilege of killing everyone in jail. In some maps you will be rewarded for getting halfway or some other distance by increasing perks (an example would be *not* getting sent to jail when you fall off, or even a teleport to enemy spawn). Teleports are usually marked as to where they go, although some are invisible (aka a "secret"). Boost regions are often marked on the ramps, and will give you a speed boost if you go over them in the right direction. The reverse is also true on that they can reduce your speed if you go over them backwards. They can be useful because you can often loop back round on them again and again and gain speed that way. Secrets can involve any of the former, and are often cleverly hidden, or only awarded at the end of the map. An example of a secret would be a health pack hidden behind an invisible wall which you can pass through. Another less "secret" secret would be the blue orb at the end of surf_utopia which will travel around with you for a certain amount of time, healing and re-supplying you. Another common sort of secret is a room with a pass code (e.g. surf_thriller). These are often old CS maps which have been ported over, and usually require the "use" command to activate (something which is not part of the default TF2 bindings).

Climbing quickly is achievable by either corkscrewing, or zigzagging. All this does is means you take an indirect route, and take longer to get where you might have been otherwise. In taking longer to get there you have more time to gain height. An example would be that you're travelling down a ramp quite quickly, and the next ramp is immediately in front of you but up high. You fling yourself off the ramp, and then spiral round, or possibly double back on yourself in midair. That way you can climb to the desired height, and then drop on to the higher ramp.

**Footnotes**

The rate at which you can turn is dictated by the servers "air_accelerate" value, but most surf servers which are properly set up will have this configured so as not to get in your way. The only thing you have to bear in mind is that servers are not necessarily consistent. The air_accelerate value is nor normally available in TF2, so don't go looking for it in console. In order to change it the server needs sourcemod installed. The same is also true for the servers gravity setting. Some servers will set the gravity as being slightly lower than others, as it makes the maps a little more forgiving.

Remember where I said source engine has *semi* realistic physics? The fall damage is one of the less realistic parts. Landing in water will save you from all fall damage, even if it only comes up to your knees. There is a precise minimum number of hammer units depth for this to work, but I can't remember it off hand. Anyway, maps will frequently make use of this to save you from death when you land on a platform.

Some maps will have invisible walls/teleports. In some cases it is possible to shortcut ramps, but often the map designer will have put an invisible wall in so that isn't possible. An example would be surf_thriller, where it would look as if you could jump down and miss out a significant portion. There is a console command to make all invisible walls visible, but I can't remember it since I only heard ot from a friend in passing. Other maps will have glitches/unintended oversights where the designer has *forgotten* to add the jail teleports to various surfaces. These can be manipulated/abused at your leisure.

A good map to start on is surf_10x. Surf_river and surf_japan are CS classics, which have both been re-done TF2 style (surf_river also has a semi clone called surf_dicks, for shits and giggles). Surf_thriller is another classic, though slightly harder than surf_10x. My favourite maps are made by [Panzerhandschuh](http://gamebanana.com/members/357075), simply because they're incredibly well made and clean looking (I especially like utopia). Panzerhandschuh's maps aren't hugely difficult (though more so than surf_10x or surf_thriller), but they're just nice to bide your time on.

Happy surfing!