Auto Strafer

Despite their valiant efforts, developers can only go so far in terms of catering to the player base, since finding a compromise between the lead writer’s artistic vision and the limitations of the game engine is no easy feat. Once it realized this, the gaming industry giant known as Valve started allowing the community to make full use of the original assets and create their own campaigns that enhance the gameplay and lore behind their titles to this day.

This approach also led to the creation of dedicated plugin systems designed to bring additional functions and features, such as Auto Strafer.

Being an improved version of GoldSource, which originated as a spin-off of the Quake Engine, the latest version of the Source engine retains some of the mechanics responsible for the fast-paced movements that characterized the first-person arena shooters of yesteryear. One of them is bunny-hopping, a series of precise jumps while facing forwards to gain the necessary momentum that propels you throughout the levels at blazing speeds in a digital form of what can be regarded as parkour.

By leveraging the customization prowess of the SourceMod plugin environment, the extension at hand lets users exploit the potential behind implementing the maximum acceleration speed of the Source engine, thus extending support beyond Valve’s original games and providing players with the opportunity of carrying out bunny-hopping sessions in custom mods levels across the Source-based catalog that ranger from Left 4 Dead, Portal and Counter-Strike titles to Half-Life 2 mods and its derivatives.

While the plugin’s console commands can be triggered at a client level, those who want to race various custom levels with their friends have the option of applying variables in the servers they manually set up, ultimately being able to customize the speed with which players move at certain angles or when to disable the functionality altogether for areas where the technique is deemed too unstable for use.

Whether you and your friends happen to enjoy speedrunning in Valve games and want to extend the sessions beyond their official titles or you simply wish to see how fast you can reach the end of a certain chapter when maximizing the acceleration speed that the Source engine is capable of, Auto Strafer may be the right tool for the job, given its compatibility with the powerful SourceMod system.