Grinding help

[-=X-N-A=-]

Hello. I am a fairly new player, as I started last week. I have learned to double-bind, and hot to use it while grinding to switch directions with no room between. I am fairly good, but there is one thing that always gets me killed. Grinding.

I have no earthly idea of how players know if they'll die when they hit a wall when they're grinding alongside a perpendicular one. For instance, they are going something like:
|
---------------->----------|

Half the time when they reach the wall, they turn. The rest of the time, they keep going straight. When I think I can go straight, I blow up. When I turn, I could have gone straight. How can I tell what's going to happen?

[wrtlprnft]

On most servers this depends on the amount of rubber you have left and your current speed. Example: if your current rubber usage (look at the rubber gauge) is 2 and CYCLE_RUBBER (look at the rubber gauge, too) is 5 you can run into a wall for roughly the time you'd otherwise need to move 3 (=5-2) metres (1m is roughly half a grid square at default settings, I think). At a speed of 30m/s (speed gauge!) this means that you'll die after 100ms of running into a wall.
Basically get a feeling for the server's settings and keep an eye on the rubber gauge's needle.

[Jonathan]

(1m is roughly half a grid square at default settings, I think)

An old convention is that it's twice that. Doesn't really fit with the size of the models, but we're talking about game units anyway.

[wrtlprnft]

I think the default value for GRID_SIZE changed to 2 somewhere in the development of 0.2.8.0, so one grid square is 2×2 units now.

[Sab0o]

I have the same problem, and if i read the wiki correctly just now, the faster you are going when you hit the wall you are grinding against, the closer you are to it. Makes sense but I have yet to test it.

ps. first post :O hihi

[Lucifer]

I think it's the other way around, actually. Rubber artificially slows the cycle down to give human reflexes and network latency a break from reality, but it only has that effect for a certain amount of time, or a certain distance (it's configurable).

So the faster you are going, the less time or distance you have to react. The result is usually grinds farther away from the wall because people tend to overcompensate. No matter what speed, if you wait too long, you will hit the wall and explode. So the faster you are going, the smaller the window of action becomes, and you have to deal with it. It's possible (and happens quite often) to go faster than rubber can deal with to compensate for network latency.

[Z-Man]

Lucifer is correct, and even more: even if you start out with no rubber used and only turn away from the wall as soon as your rubber is completely used up (minus a teeny bit so you don't die), you will get closer to the wall when you go slower.

[Sab0o]

ok Thanks Lucifer and z-man.