UT3 duel tutorial

Originally posted by Iuckshot

   English version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiJR5DKwQbk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K1BySPme5E
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Oryginal version (polish):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUrj76HIBNU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc7DVuBykM8
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Full tutorial text:

All items respawn timing is rounded to full seconds.

Hello and welcome, here’s Xirios on the mic, also known as Cicada. I’ve decided to make this video to answer frequently asked questions about skill improvement. One of the best ways to increase your skill in any FPP game is dueling. As an example I’ll use UNREAL TOURNAMENT 3 because this is the game I know the best. By the way, I stick to UT series for many years. Although rules considered in this tutorial can refer to all FPP games. Those rules are timing, movement, adjusting  proper weapon to the situation, audition play, proper configuration, predicting and map control.

TIMING
Timing is an action when the key item on the map is being taken as it spawns. In UT3 the most desired power up is shield belt. It's present, at least it should be, one every tournament duel map. The shield gives the player 100 armor points and absorbs 100% of damage. It means that when players gets some hits, the belt goes out first and then player’s health. Shield belt spawns about every 55 seconds. If we start 10 minutes duel, the first belt will spawn at 09:05. The next one at 8:10, 7:15, 06:20 and so on. Just look on the clock in the corner of the HUD while taking the belt and add 5 seconds to the current time. This is only the case when you take the belt as it spawns. If of any reason you take it at different time, for example at 09:01, the next belt will spawn at 09:06. This is one of the most important items in whole UT series. It gives quite big health advantage over the enemy that’s why it’s worth to fight for it. How to recover the belt from the opponent? Use the Impact Hammer secondary fire directly on the enemy do take the belt of him, It might be very risky though.

The next item every player should remember about, is this golden armor vest. It spawns every 27 seconds and absorbs 75% of damage. When fused with the shield belt it gives 150 points of armor.

Then we have tight pads which give 30 points of armor and helmet, giving 20 points. They both spawn every 27 seconds and absorb 50% of damage each.

Good dueler picks everything he can from the arena, thanks to this he doesn’t allow his opponent to have an advantage. If we have 100 health points, it is possible to increase that number by taking health vials. Each of them gives us 5hp more. The maximum HP player can have is 199 points.

Beside of all those items the player should also pay attention to the jump boots, which can be found on duel maps with open area such as Deck or Heat Ray. Thanks to them we will be able to quickly reach higher situated places on the map, escape or do some outstanding air frags. Boots respawn every 27 seconds.

Usually we time only belt, timing of the rest is not obligatory but it’s good to keep close to them.

MOVEMENT
The next obligatory feature every good dueler should have is movement. By movement I mean the skill of perfect moving on the map. UT3 offers some special moves accelerating the player and as a result, making him more difficult to hit. Special moves are: dodge – a hi-speed jump in any direction performed by quick double-tapping a direction button; double jump – performed by pressing jump button twice; wall-jump and hammer-jump which are strictly connected with double jump. Wall jump allows us to bounce of the walls, pillars, boxes and any other geometry on the map. It brings two advantages: the player moves faster and he’s extremely hard to hit, especially in short distance. Hammer-jump is performed with the impact hammer. You have to hold the fire button, aim the hammer on the ground and release the button. If you have jump boots, you can do a double jump and fly really far away.  Let’s have a look at some special moves on a few duel maps.

ADJUSTING PROPER WEAPON TO THE SITUATION 
Adjusting proper weapon to the situation is the third point of this tutorial. The best thing to do is to bind weapons to the keys which surround movement keys. If you play on WSAD for example, you should bind the weapons around those keys and to the mouse buttons. In UT3 guns can be changed with a mouse scroll by default. This is enough if you play on warfare or vctf at public servers, but when dueling changing weapons with a scroll isn’t the best idea. In 1 on 1 every part of the second is critical. Furthermore, even before we choose the weapon we might be in disadvantage. This is common for duels that just a tiny moment can decide about the frag.
UT3 brings us a lot of weapons, every with two types of fire, except of rocket launcher, which has a little bigger tipes of fire. From hated by hoards of players bio-rifle to skill-demanding sniper rifle. Each gun might be very effective if we know when and how to use it. On the open maps, where there is a lot of free space, shock rifle’s, singer’s and sniper rifle’s primary fire are the best choice. In mid-distance: secondary stinger’s, primary link’s, secondary bio-rifle’s, shock's primary and combo, rocket launcher, double enforcer and both types of flack’s  fire are the most useful. In close combat use impact hammer, secondary link’s and bio-rifle’s, all types of rocket launcher’s fire and both flack’s. The best weapons to spam in tight places are: grenades, rockets launched straight under foe’s legs, flack’s shrapnels, shock rifle’s secondary fire and primary of bio-rifle. Perhaps it isn’t the most fair fight style but it gives a big advantage to the player who badly plays with point weapons. Just to sum up, a player with a weak aim is able to over spam to the death the player with a great aim. I’m not going to talk about the damage, caused by every weapon because this information is easily available in the net. Personally I recommend Unrealpedia. Guns spawn every 27 seconds.   

AUDITION PLAY
Audition play is a very good way to hit the foe who is nearby. It is often used by players. None of the top duelers fight with the music turned on. What is more, environment sounds such as steam hiss, drops pouring from the pipe or waterfall rush are also muted. The announcer is limited to zero but volume of the sounds generated by the enemy is increased to the maximum. The point is that every action performed by the opponent like running through the water, jumps, taking items and his footsteps, generates sounds, which allow us to locate him quite precisely. 
It’s worth to say about the UTcomp application while talking about footsteps. Thanks to this program we are able to turn off our own footsteps. Of course only we will not hear them. They will be hearable to our rival. Audition play gives us an opportunity to ambush the enemy, to put some shots in the place where our rival is about to appear or to spam the area where he is probably present. It is recommended to generate as few sounds as possible. You can do it by crouching for example.

GRAPHIC CONFIGURATION OF THE GAME
The next in line there's a graphic configuration of the game. The case looks familiar to the weaponry; there is a big difference between certain one on one fights. Every player configures UT as he likes in order to play comfortably. Although, the professional players usually turn off the weapon view, shrink the HUD, minimize the crosshair and set the bright skins, which means that they see the enemy in very shiny color. They also turn off all the visual effects such as smoke, fog or reflects. Many people fight using setting called LEGOLAND. The main goal of this configuration is to gain the simplest colors and  really raw geometry of the map. It doesn’t look well maybe, but this setting allows us to see the rival perfectly, especially when his model has been set as a bright skin.

With the graphic settings there also comes the mouse setting. The best thing you can do, is to set the mouse to make a 360 degree turn on the 30cm distance. What does it mean? Let’s put a white sheet and the mouse on it. We mark a dot at the outer edge of our mouse. Next, we run any single player map, without bots, and then make a whole 360 degree turn, after that, we mark another dot at the same edge of the mouse as before.  Finally we have to measure the distance between two dots. The result we gain is a distance which mouse has to ride in order to rotate our character around. Of course the distance depends on our mouse model and sensitivity set in Windows. Why it is good to have a high sensitivity at all? The higher it is, the calmer we rotate our character and aim more comfortably with point weapons such as enforces, sniper rifle, stinger and shock’s primary. 

There is one more thing you have to know – the field of view. The wider field of view we have, the more map we can see one the sides of the screen. Furthermore it is easier to aim with point weapons. Usually the FOV is set to 100.

 PREDICTING
It’s quite pointless to explain that in detail. The case is to be able to predict our enemy moves on the map. The main rule is that if the player is a newbie, it is easier to predict his moves. So it is not hard to guess that he will go forward after respawn, he will not cheat you or play hide and seek to confuse you. The situation becomes more complicated when the enemy is skilled. Pro duelers will crouch, fall back, stop from time to time, listen, return, spam or activate the lifts. Sometimes it even happens that they throw weapons or don’t take power ups to decoy the foe. Effective cheats in 50% can confuse the enemy. Then we can escape to heal, or attack if we think that our rival has much less hp than we have.

MAP CONTROL
We can say about the perfect map control when we know all places on the map, weapons and power ups placement, when we can use the map geometry to do tricks and to press the enemy so hard, that he's unable to take pickups and dies just after respawn. That last thing is called spawn killing, which means successful fragging the enemy at the spawn points or around them. To do such, we have to know all spawn points on the map and to be oriented where our enemy is going to respawn after his death. We can look for spawn points in two ways. The first is to run the map editor, and to look for markers indicating spawn points. The second one is to start single player map. We suicide and check where do we respawn. There’s nothing epic in spawn killing and it’s hardly unfair, but still it’s effective and can give us a big score supremacy over the enemy as long as he’s not able to get any weapon or power up to encounter us.
There is one basic rule while dueling. You mustn’t attack the enemy who is better equipped in weapons and power ups than you, because doing it just instantly makes you a looser of the match. If there is no weapon around after respawn, we have to walk to the nearest weapon locker and wait quietly until it appears. If it’s possible we pick vials and armors. Then we are prepared to attack.

It’s enough of theory now. Let’s take a look at some outstanding 1/1 actions.


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