Since people (@skelephone @slime) have expressed interest in learning how to surf in CSGO, I figured I’d make a new thread dedicated to surfing, that way we can plan out play sessions!
What Is Surf
Surf is a custom mode in source-engine games where you use “perpetual falling” to ride ramps towards an exit. Ironically, the most apt comparison to real life is not surfing, but snowboarding. You ride the ramps the same way a snowboarder rides a mountain slope!
Basics
The most important feature of all surf maps are the ramps. Imagine a triangle extruded along its forward-axis. That’s a ramp. Here is an example!
To build speed in surf, you ride ramps. This involves aligning yourself correctly, then strafing into the ramp. For example, if you are on the left side of a ramp, you strafe to the right.
The physics principles of riding ramps are simple:
- Ride lower to build speed but lose height
- Ride higher to lose speed but gain height
You turn “into” a ramp to ride higher, and “out of” a ramp to ride lower. You should never press W/S unless you know exactly what you are doing.
This is just for ramps, though. The other major component of surfing is how much aerial control you have. You can turn on a dime in mid-air and retain most of your momentum, if you know how to do it!
To turn while surfing, you have to hold the same strafe direction as the direction you turn your mouse. So, if you want to turn left, you hold strafe left and turn your mouse left, ideally at the same time. Turning should be as smooth as possible, because hard corners or otherwise botched turns can stop your run immediately.
This combination of ramp platforming, incredible aerial control, and momentum-based physics is so satisfying when you grasp it intuitively!
Nuances
The main trip-up people have with surf is that you cannot simply do these two things - riding and air control - and expect to finish a course. No, there’s a whole world of nuance that you have to master first!
The first nuance is that your surfing is a constant push/pull between height and speed. Every unit you travel upwards means slowing yourself according to gravity. So careful management of how far up the ramp you sit and how fast you are going is key to completing courses. The number one failure of all players is not having enough speed to hit a ramp you need to.
This usually manifests as the dreaded bump or slam. If you come into a ramp directly, instead of aligning yourself to be parallel with the surface, you “slam” into the side. This causes you to lose a bunch of momentum into the ramp.
To counter bumps, you have to have smooth transfers. A transfer or transition is the act of going from one ramp to another. A “clean transfer” is one where you align perfectly with the ramp, losing no speed to a bump. This is VERY IMPORTANT, arguably the most important technique to learn once you understand the basic physics.
Good rule of thumb is that you always want to enter a ramp near the very top, and as close to parallel with the ramp direction as possible. I have illustrated this with incredible paint skills: red is a slam, and green is a clean transfer.
Map Types
Maps are generally broken down along two axes: tier, and staging.
Tiers describe how hard a map is. This is usually done by tracking how many people have finished the map. Higher tiers means more difficult, usually because of technical precision, maps. A T1 map may be easy to complete, but hard to get a good time on, or have really difficult bonus stages. You can also describe yourself as a player according to the highest tier of map you can beat. For example, I’m a T3 player, since I can beat most T1-T3 maps.
Tiers also typically only describe how ~technical~ a map is. Some T1 maps are pretty long, so the skill becomes less being able to hit your flicks, and more about being able to play consistently for a few minutes.
Staging is a simple dichotomy: does this map have checkpoints or not? If it does, it’s called a staged map; if it doesn’t, it’s called a linear map.
Stages are typically much shorter than a full linear map, but a staged map is overall longer. Servers track your stage times for PBs, but do not grant rank points until you have fully cleared the map. Falling off and resetting to a checkpoint only resets your timer on the first stage, so you’ll often see people with 11-15 minute clear times on staged maps for their first clear, and then they gradually whittle it down as they master each stage. The goal of a stage map is to eventually clear all stages in one smooth go.
Linear maps are typically less than a minute to clear once you understand the route, while staged maps typically hover around 1-2 minute clears for no-fail runs. That said, there are definitely outliers, like a T1 22-stage map with a 16 minute WR (ugh).
Glossary
Here’s some terminology I’ve either run across or made up in my brain for different surf features and principles.
Techniques
- Flick: Quickly “flicking” your mouse into the ramp near the end. This translates a large portion of your forward momentum into vertical momentum. A very important technique if a map asks you to travel upwards without a ramp that curves up.
- Slingshot/scoop: A line through a flared or curved ramp which starts at the top and ends near the bottom. Because of the ramp’s curve, this slingshots you forward with a ton of momentum.
- Leave/dive: Leaving a ramp early so that you start falling sooner. This is typically important on flared ramps, or ramps which curve into going straight up, as following the ramp precisely will lose too much momentum.
Map Features
- Jump/flare: A ramp feature. The ramp curves upwards at the start or end. This means, sans extra player input, you will “jump” off the ramp if you continue straight. Most jumps are tricks and lose a lot of momentum you probably otherwise need.
- Curve: A ramp feature. The ramp curves in a direction. Unlike a typical ramp, you do not want to press into a curve, because you will quickly lose your momentum. Instead, you want to turn in the direction of the curve as though you are doing a standard aerial turn, but just enough that you stick to the curve. Good for aligning you and also a potentially enormous speed boost if use right.
- Drains: I call these toilets, because when they are technically rigorous, they are downright evil. A straight shaft down where you have to rotate - sometimes in a specific direction - to avoid hitting obstacles. Most drains restrict your lateral movement, so you have to be very good at rotating tight curves. A common high-level surfer keybind is designed to aid in drains by setting the “move camera left” command (+left) to a key or mouse button. That way, if you hold the key and strafe at the same time, you automatically start rotating, no mouse movement required.
- Chutes: The opposite of drains. Where drains require you to successfully fall through obstacles, chutes propel you upwards. Most chutes don’t require any special techniques and act purely as a way to transition from one section of the course to another, but some also require you to do the same rotation as a drain, but while traveling up. Tough!
- Funnels/rings/poles: These generally demarcate an area as having invisible teleport volumes, such that you have to travel through the ring or on the correct side of the pole. They funnel players into tight paths that then often immediately open up. Really common on aerial maps, less common on indoors maps.
- Boosts: Sometimes map designers like to put boosts on ramps on as air triggers. They give you a big speed boost.
- Gaps: Some maps include awkward gaps or holes in the ramp. The solution for this is easy; they are “microtransfers”, so you leave the ramp slightly right before the gap, then you strafe back into it once the gap is cleared. They are mostly traps for players who just hold strafe and don’t use their aerial agility.
Training
I’ll be taking people into the server I play on to train them how to play. I figure we’ll probably coordinate through Steam and Discord, so if you’re interested, drop me an invite on one or both. My Discord is Tegiminis#4243, and my Steam is just Tegiminis.
Once we have a few people, I’ll start looking to schedule some group sessions.
