ST-CS-10-339-75
March 2002

2.  Instant Crouching  (U)

Crouching, in Counter-Strike, is effectively instantanious. It takes something on the order of 0.1 seconds to go from standing up to crouching down. The consequence of this is that the tactic of aiming for headshots with light weapons is badly weakened since it is impossible to track the motion of a crouching player - there is no motion; the movement is instantious.

In real life, a crouch takes about two seconds - a fairly slow movement, and a player in close combat, already lined up and scoring headshots will be able to track this movement and continue scoring headshots.

In Counter-Strike, his opponent moves from standing to crouching instantly. There is no travel time. As such, there is no way to track; the opponent is now simply somewhere else, and safe, below his stream of bullets which were about to inflict the fatal headshot.

In this footage, the defending Counter-Terrorist is waiting behind cover. A hostile Terrorist approaches and the CT steps out to engage. Two headshots are achieved in the first three shots fired; the CT then over compensates, corrects, and is just lining up with the opponents head for the killing headshot.

At this point, the hostile crouches. It takes one frame for him to move from standing to crouching, and then two more frames to fall to the ground; total time 0.15 seconds. This is enough time for one TMP bullet to be fired - humans simply do not crouch this quickly. As it is, the Terrorist here simply avoids the killing headshot which would have occured had he not been crouch so impossibly quickly, and the attacking player - skilled enough to achieve headshots in this position - is killed.

In the authors opinion, crouching needs to occur at a realistic speed so that players trying for headshots can realistically track the head as it descends, instead of being killed outright since their opponent is performing the impossible.