Dodges explained. Power & more - Rocket Science #14
Transcript
Hey guys, HalfwayDead here with a real episode of Rocket Science. Not those stupid bronze tips they show on RLCS...*cough* For real though, dodges/flips/whatever you want to call them are a topic that I had planned for an eternity and I had some interesting findings so let's get straight to the topic.
Preconditions
Before I talk about what happens in the dodge, I need to talk about the preconditions. In most situations you're just gonna jump off the ground and jump a second time while pushing the analog stick in a direction of your choice. How far you need to push it depends on your deadzone and dodge deadzone. You can use my web app with your own controller to test this yourself (Link here). The in-game setting air sensitivity doesn't have any impact on dodges. However, external tools such as the Steam controller configuration or DS4Windows can increase the sensitivity of dodges.
Time Window
OK, back to the beginning. So you jump off the ground and then there is a time window in which you can dodge. But how much time do you have exactly? Well, the game has a timer which counts down 1.25s, but this timer only starts counting after your initial jump is done. Now what do I mean by that? Whenever you jump, you can hold your button down for 1/5th of a second to get a jump with extra height. Any longer won't make a difference.
If you tap it really quickly, the jump won't go as high. In these first 200ms, the dodge timer won't start counting if you keep holding the jump button. That means, with a maximum height jump you have 1.45s to dodge, but if you only do a small jump the window will be a bit smaller. This could make a difference when going off the wall or ceiling, for example, where you sometimes don't want the full power jump but still wait a long time for the dodge. Shoutout to Whoomp and Bakkes, who figured this out on their own in my Discord.
Infinite dodge timer
As most people know by now, the timer only starts if you jump. If you drop off the ceiling or any other surface after having landed on it with all 4 wheels at the same time, you have an infinite amount of time to dodge.
There is, however, a weird case when you jump in the curve while driving up the wall. Because you jump but your wheels never lift off the ground, you will never land, and when you drop off the ceiling you won't be able to dodge at all. If you jump off the ceiling in that case, you can still dodge. It is consistent with the internal logic, but I'd still consider this something Psyonix should change. Thanks to enigma_please for making me aware of this.
Flip reset condition
Lastly, I want to mention that it's possible to dodge while 0-3 0-2 wheels are touching a surface. If all 4 at least 3 wheels are touching, then you are considered as on the ground. Pressing jump will just make you jump normally.
How dodges work
Enough preconditions. Let's talk about the dodge.
Every dodge has 3 different components to it.
- The impulse
- The torque
- The "I don't have a name for this"
so let's just explain it first.
Vertical momentum cancellation
What I'm talking about is something that probably everyone knows subconsciously: Dodges cancel vertical momentum, but the matter in which they do is quite odd.
For the first 18 physics ticks or 0.15s, the vertical momentum continues as usual. That's why dodging into balls that are slightly below or above you can work out. But then, the vertical speed gets reduced by 35% every tick.
If you're traveling upwards, then this effect only goes on for 8 ticks, probably to allow boosting upwards quickly again. 8 ticks alone are enough to reduce your speed to 3% of what it originally was, and gravity is gonna take care of the rest, so you'll almost start from 0.
For the entire remainder of the dodge, if you have downwards momentum, it will be reduced by 35% per tick. This, in combination with gravity, eventually balances out to a falling speed of 15uu/s while the dodge is going on. A dodge lasts a total of 0.65s, meaning this effect will almost stop all your vertical momentum for half a second.
Impulse
Now for the impulse. The impulse is what gives your car the extra speed in a certain direction. But which direction?
The impulse never goes up or down. It only propels you horizontally. The best way to think about which direction the impulse will go is in a top-down view.
Imagine an arrow pointing from the car's center of mass to its front. That is the forward direction of the car. If you're looking at this from above, then the length may be different if the car is tilted up or down. This doesn't matter as we're only looking at the direction.
If you were to dodge straight forward, then the impulse will push you in that exact direction, increasing your speed by exactly 500uu/s. That's a forward dodge.
There are also sideways and backwards dodges. Sideway dodges also have the same standard speed of 500uu/s, and as you would expect, they will go 90° right or left of forward direction. This top-down viewpoint also explains why the left and right directions switch if you tilt your car far enough back. What may be left from the POV of the player is right of the arrow.
Sideways and Backwards Scaling
Alright, I stated that sideway dodges have the same standard speed as forward dodges. That means they will have the same amount of speed if you're standing still. But they scale linearly with forward momentum with a factor of up to 1.9. When standing still, the factor is 1, and it smoothly increases up to 1.9 at the maximum forward speed. Yes, they can become almost twice as strong as forward dodges if you travel with the maximum speed of 2300uu/s in the direction where the front of your car is facing. But that also means you won't get any extra speed if you tilt your car 90° in the air before the dodge since all the momentum won't be in the forward direction. The true solution is, of course, a diagonal dodge, but I'll talk about that after backward dodges.
Backward dodges have a base speed of 533uu/s and a scaling factor of 2.5 depending on the forward speed. Wow, this sounds great. Surely this means we'll see everyone flipping backwards soon if they're out of boost? While I'd love to revolutionize the RL meta in this hilarious manner, it sadly doesn't work that way.
When standing still, a backwards dodge is just a backwards dodge like you would expect. But if you have any significant amount of speed, the game knows whether you're currently travelling backwards or forwards, and defines the backwards and forwards direction of the dodge based on that. That means you can use the incredible power of a backwards flip to slow down by up to 1333uu/s in an instant, but it is impossible to use this power forwards because if you turn around it will be considered a forward dodge. You can theoretically use a diagonal backward dodge to gain even more sideways momentum than what would be possible with just a side dodge though.
Diagonal Dodges
Talking about diagonal dodges, how does direction and power work there? For the direction, I'd refer back to my web app because the deadzone can affect dodge direction. If you take a direction from there as an example, you can place it on top of the top-down view of the car and align it with the forward direction. This allows you to see the dodge direction.
Then, you need to split the direction into forward and sideways components, because that's all a diagonal dodge is. And that's also how it is affected by the scaling of power. The forward part of the dodge always stays the same. But the sideways component scales based on the amount of forward momentum, which means that the direction in which the impulse propels you is not necessarily exactly the same as the "official" dodge direction. The true angle can be calculated based on the 2 input angles and the velocity. If you want the formula, feel free to contact me.
Optimal Angles
Now the important question is, of course, which would be the optimal angle to diagonal dodge to gain speed. Because there are 4 variables, this is not solvable without an assumption. Which in this case will be that we are trying to stay on the same trajectory and only get faster. That allows me to calculate a lot of values for different velocities.
At 1700uu/s, the optimal dodge would be to turn the car 60° left or right. Then put the analog stick in a spot with a dodge direction of 52°. At around 100uu/s, it would be slightly better to turn only 55° and then also have a dodge direction of 55°.
The reason I chose 1700uu/s as an example is because a proper dodge will give you a speed boost of 600uu/s or more, getting you to max speed instantly. At faster speeds, you will just get to max speed anyway. Keep in mind that these calculations do not take into account the fact that you can boost during a dodge. So especially at lower speeds where you don't instantly get to max speed with the dodge, the boost might be more valuable if the car was tilted in a slightly different manner, but that is a topic for the future.
Torque
Enough about impulses. Let's get to the torque. How the car spins during the dodge.
Just like the impulse, we can take the same dodge direction here that we get out of the web app. And once again, we should split it into forward and sideways. Throughout the full 0.65s of the dodge, every tick there will be a torque acting on the car. The best I can do to explain the strength is to tell you that it is strong enough to bring the car to its maximum spinning speed in just 3 ticks, 25ms.
Flip Canceling
Let's talk about flip canceling. What is it that you can cancel? The impulse and vertical momentum stop can't be canceled. Nor can you cancel the sideways rolling torque. Only the forward or backward rolling part of the torque can be canceled out by pushing the analog stick straight down/up, opposite to the dodge direction.
In the case of a diagonal dodge, the sideroll will continue on, so you should also only cancel by pulling straight down/up. If you only push the stick halfway in the opposite direction, then you will also only cancel out 50% of the torque. This amount is unaffected by the air sensitivity setting, which is quite odd, and should be changed in my opinion. Even with 10x sensitivity, you need to push your analog stick all the way to cancel a flip.
Ever since the NoFlip situation, Psyonix seems to have implemented a fix that makes canceling a flip in the first 5 ticks impossible. It also means that you have 40ms to move your stick after a dodge, which should make it possible to get consistently the fastest cancel, although it is still very hard. This is the fastest possible cancel of a forward flip.
Perfect NoFlips are only possible in specific scenarios. For example, when you hit the ball at the instant where you dodge, then the ball can act a torque on your car in the direction opposite to the dodge torque. The two torques cancel each other out for the first ticks, and you get a perfect NoFlip.
There are other ways to prevent your nose from slamming into the ground. You can either give your car some backwards angular momentum before the dodge, or you can airroll to rotate the axis, making the nose point in a different direction. And you can, of course, combine the two.
If done perfectly, it will allow you to do forward dodges where the boost exhaust will constantly be facing backwards for obvious benefits. What might be even better, though, and in my opinion easier, is to do a diagonal dodge that you cancel as fast as possible. In a diagonal dodge, you have less forward torque and the airroll comes for free. If done perfectly, it almost looks like a sideflip, but the impulse will be diagonal regardless.
Overall, this technique with 45° angle dodges on keyboard is pretty easy to do. On controller, not so much. The more sideways you dodge, the easier it is to cancel the flip, but you'll also gain less forward momentum.
Half Flips
Of course, there are also situations where you want to cancel your flip later, like in a half flip. Canceling a straight front or backflip until you have no more angular momentum can take up to almost a second, and you'll rotate another 100°, which is why diagonal halfflips can be more effective because they can be canceled faster. If you want to go straight backwards, you should choose a narrow dodge angle, however. A 45° halfflip, like on keyboard, is not worth it unless you want to want to go back at an angle.
Stalls
Last but not least, I want to talk about an odd case. It is possible to do a flip with no direction. The most common name I've heard for this is "stall". A flip with no direction means that two components of the flip won't be active. The torque and the impulse. That's right, you will only cancel your vertical momentum and do nothing else.
This has few uses, but there are some odd cases where you're falling, and you're already directly underneath the ball. Dodging with a direction would then just put you in a worse spot.
In order to do this move, you need at least one of the specific air roll left or right bindings. Then you need to steer in exactly the opposite direction of the airroll, so the direction cancels out. There is a controller tutorial by Squishymuffinz that I'll put in the video description.
Alright, what I haven't talked about is wavedashing because that's gonna be its own episode.
Outro
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