A guide to shooting

“I know how to shoot, you just press the left mouse button!” Well, no, you don’t. Know how to shoot, that is. Statistically, I would be right more often than wrong if I said you didn’t know how to shoot; over half the players I see in pubs are quite ineffective with their guns. Alright maybe you know how to shoot, you just aren’t doing it. It’s not a particularly hard concept, so I’ll take a stab at writing a guide about how to properly operate your assault rifle.

Intro

Your goal when engaging an enemy is to deliver as much damage as possible with as few bullets (= time) as possible. That way you are more likely to live. Statistically speaking, the longer a firefight goes on, the greater the chance somebody is about to drop dead. Until you reach a certain point when both people are spamming so much that the graph levels off and you’re at the mercy of sheer luck. A drawn out firefight is bad because the longer it lasts, the more damage is dealt. You want to live, but you have to get greedy and make your goal that you want to live a productive life after firefights. Getting severely wounded means you have to wait for a medic or play cautiously. Most of the time, dying to get full health is not the best idea, so you need to get to a level where you can shoot proficiently enough not only to kill more than you die, but to also be useful after a firefight.

The process of killing someone with your gun consists of two parts: aiming (acquiring your target and keeping a bead on them as you shoot), and shooting (making bullets leave your gun in a controlled fashion so as to control recoil and spread). Aiming is easy; you’ve been doing it for years. Every time you click an icon or select a form field, you’re using aim. Tracking a target is not something you do much every day outside of gaming, but it’s really just acquiring the target over and over, and/or moving your crosshair at mostly the same speed as your target in order to stay on them. This is very easy to do, but much harder to do quickly and precisely. Improving your aiming ability takes practice, and there’s no way around it. We will discuss how to remove as many barriers as possible, but at the end of the day, if you need to improve your aim, you have to put in the hours. You also have about a 200 ms delay between seeing a target and being able to react. The more the target startles you, the faster you can react. There are many “reaction time” tests online that can prove you’ll get about 10-30 ms faster when startled. You’ll also react faster when you’re pumped up and blood is flowing well (= warm hands; cold hands make you shoot slower). Realize that it’s not really possible to do anything about this delay, and everyone experiences it. Smart play can make even the slowest reacting player capable of dominating a game.

Shooting is the main thing we’re going to focus on, because it can be greatly improved by simply knowing AND doing what is right. In pubs, and low-medium skill tier matches, being a good shooter with good aim will allow you to dominate. Tactics are important, but really only come into play at high skill levels where strong aiming and shooting are a prerequisite. That’s not to say all high skill players are great gunners; some do it just well enough to allow their skills in other areas to compensate and make them an overall skilled player. What I’m saying is that being a good gunner, even if you’re hopeless at tactics, flag running, and teamplay, can make you a valuable asset when you’re starting out with clans.

The final thing we’ll discuss is how to eliminate as much as possible the handicaps imposed by hardware, as well as by Urban Terror. Having a good mouse and the perfect config might not make you able to shoot 30% with the LR, but it will make your learning experience easier.

So now that we’ve got a complete 750 word high school essay masquerading as an intro, let’s get to the content (see, this is definitely not a high school essay – we have content!).

Aiming

There’s not a whole lot I can write about the subject of aiming. You’ll either be good enough at aiming that you will benefit a lot from learning to shoot properly, or you’ll need more practice with aiming before you see a significant difference. Or you are a good gunner already and just want to read my guide.:) Anyway…

When you aim, you should be aiming with the crosshair at a target, not at the target. Confused? Focus your eyes on the crosshair, not your target. Focusing at the target is what I do when I’m not trying to play well, and just screwing around. It’s sort of the default way I aim, I suppose. In fact, I probably play 90% of matches this way, because it seems to be the most natural way to aim, or perhaps I just learned a bad habit when I started playing FPS games years ago. This is unfortunate because I see noticeable accuracy increases when I focus on the crosshair as opposed to enemy players, but it’s nice to be able to always “step it up” when necessary, I guess. ANYWAY I find it is easier to stay on a target when you are focused on the crosshair, as opposed to focusing on the target and trying to keep the crosshair on it. You get better feedback when you’re watching the crosshair, and can track more easily. Oh and you get to actually see whether you’re aiming at the enemy or you are overshooting/undershooting them. This is something you should do when you’re getting bad hits, because it might be your aim (but it’s probably the 2 bit box with 29 servers hosted). It’s also something you should do when you want to work on your shooting skills, because you need to know your aim is as good as you can get it in order to train your shooting skills most effectively.

Consistently overshooting or undershooting a target can be corrected by changing your sensitivity (/sensitivity in the console). The default of 5 is pretty good I suppose, but it can be better. A low sensitivity (I define low as <5, high as >5, for this guide) will mute your mouse movements, giving you smoother motions, but slower aiming (at first, anyway, until you adjust to moving the mouse in faster, coarser movements). I like low sensitivity. I use 3. Some players use lower, some use higher, but I shoot better than most, because I use a sensitivity I like. A higher sensitivity means you can make smaller movements with the mouse to move your view on screen. This gives the advantage of faster movements compared to low sensitivity for a constant mouse velocity. The disadvantage is it’s harder to be accurate because of the faster speeds involved. You’ll always be more accurate when you can do something over a longer period, including moving the mouse. Very few top players use high sensitivity; in fact very few players of any caliber do. As best I can tell, the only big disadvantage to low sensitivity is that you can’t always do a 180 with one sweep, if you have your sensitivity low enough. If you have a small mouse pad or limited desk space, a low sensitivity may be impossible to use; the solution is to get more room.:)

I recommend picking a sensitivity you WANT to use, and adapting to it. There’s no such thing as a perfect sensitivity that will feel great the second you try it. You will have to practice with it, so you may as well stop wasting time trying hundreds of values, and just pick something. I like 3, but I used 4 before that and did okay. I dropped to 3 because I found I would zigzag when sliding at a target to shoot them, in the process missing more than I should. The lower sensitivity muted the movements (I don’t know why I had a habit of zigzagging my aim, but whatever) and fixed the problem. It took some time to adjust to the slightly lower sensitivity, but ultimately it helped my aim. I don’t recommend changing your sensitivity constantly, because you need time to fully adjust and see the benefits. A week or two is not long enough (assuming you play a 1-2 hour session every few days), because you could just be having a bad spell or a good spell in regards to your skill and scores. It will probably take longer to adjust to a big change (e.g., 6 to 2). If you think you can aim well enough with your current sensitivity, leave it as it is.

Finally, some people ask what to aim AT. Some say head, some say torso. I say torso. I’ve tried aiming at the head, and do not see a reason to do so. It’s too small a target to aim quickly at, track, and keep spread low enough to hit. If you aim at the upper torso (neck/shoulders area), you’ll get headshots anyway, due to spread and recoil. I do not ever purposely aim for the head, and I still get quite a few headshots. One headshot (or helmet shot) per 2-4 kills seems to be my average from screenshots I have. Lower skill games result in more headshots as people move less intelligently. My killing speed is extremely high, so obviously not aiming for headshots does not impact my speed, and in fact probably is why I can kill quickly. I really can’t recommend aiming for anything but the torso.

How to shoot – Part I

Now that you know the theory behind aiming, let’s discuss the practical improvements you can make in your game today. You want to balance spread, recoil, and damage per second. No, this isn’t WoW, but damage over time is very important in any game. “Spread” and “recoil” are generated with sustained firing. Spread is not really quantifiable, but it’s the area where your bullets can land. When you start shooting, your spread is low. The area your bullets can land is smaller. As you keep firing, the area grows; spread increases. Because you’re dealing with a circle, your spread increases quickly. Some crosshairs allow you to see your spread, but they’re not perfectly accurate. I am unsure how the actual spread algorithm works, but I assume every “pixel” (I believe the game “thinks” in Quake units, which is a whole other article in itself) in the cone of spread (it’s circular and extends out from the gun in 3 dimensions as a cone, so the farther away you are, the more your bullet will deviate from the center of the area you’re aimed at, on average; basically if you got 2 exact same vectors for your bullets to leave the gun, and shot one bullet at a wall 20 feet away, and another at a wall 200 feet away, the latter would deviate much further, but in practice, it’s not significant as there aren’t any maps big enough to really try it out) has an equal chance of being the point chosen for the bullet to land on. So when you have high spread, you really don’t have much chance of hitting an enemy more than a dozen or so feet away.

In UrT, the shooting is all about probability. It’s not like CS where the first bullet from your AK47 is always exactly where you aim. In UrT, only the sniper rifles have 0 spread when shot from a standstill. All the other weapons have a slight amount of spread when shot from a standstill; you can’t avoid this. Spread for all guns (we ignore the SPAS, HK, knife, and nades, here) is increased when moving, increased when sprinting, decreased when crouching (not the sniper rifles; also crouching in midair doesn’t do anything for accuracy for any gun), and increased when jumping. The sniper rifles have massive spread when moving even a bit; this is called movement penalty, and will not be discussed in this article. I’m going to discuss automatic weapons only; I may discuss the Desert Eagle in a future guide. Anyway, we want to maximize the probability of getting hits so we can kill quickly.

Recoil is generated during sustained fire, and increases linearly. It’s the deviation, on the Y axis (up/down) of your gun barrel, and thus the point where your bullets are generated from. Just like spread, distance matters. The further you are, the more the deviation will alter the ultimate site your bullet lands. Recoil is accurately measured by all the crosshairs. Your crosshair will always be dead center on your screen, but your view will slowly shift upwards as your recoil increases. You can easily see it by taking an assault rifle and just firing the whole magazine in one go. It’s much easier to control than spread because you just have to move your mouse down to keep your crosshair on your target. But as you’ll see, that won’t matter.:)

Spread and recoil must be kept low in order to keep the probability of hits high. I see so many players who do not control it properly, and thus shoot poorly. Shooting without regard for spread and recoil is called spamming. Spamming has its place, but most players don’t seem to know where that is, or don’t bother to keep a lid on their spamming.

How to shoot – Part II

I’ve always told people the following:
Close up: spam
Short range: burst 6-10
Medium range: burst 3-5
Long range: tap 1 or burst 2

That’s essentially correct, but it’s hard to know ranges, so instead I will teach you how to judge for yourself. I’m not going to teach you a list of ranges and how to burst for each, but instead how to control your fire in any situation.

First off, bursting means firing a bunch of bullets with 1 press of the mouse button. You click, hold it down, and then release. Tapping is clicking it and releasing it as if you were clicking an Internet link. Tapping refers to shooting one bullet, waiting, shooting another. It’s like semi auto mode except you’re not going to actually change the firing mode for your gun (I don’t even have a bind for that, though I often have to make one in game because my autoexec sets some of my rarely-used guns to semi…which is crippling if I am forced to pick one up). Bursting has nothing to do with burst mode, which is possibly the most underused feature in the game, since it removes all control over your gun, and actually leads to spamming. Here’s a video of tapping and bursting in case you are really dense.:P

As you can see, even tapping fails to be perfectly accurate at long range. You will miss many shots when dealing with targets far away. It’s best to let your sniper(s) deal with really pesky long range targets. Bursting is much more effective than spam, as you can see. At over twice the range, bursting delivers far more precise bullet placement than was achieved with spamming. I could do more comparisons, but seeing as I’m writing the guide, I am just going to say I’m the authority here, and bursting produces far better results than spamming. As you saw in the video, I bursted several shots, then waited for the crosshair to shrink back down to normal size, indicating the spread was back to normal. I didn’t actually watch the crosshair, as I just know how long to wait. The crosshair drops back to normal very quickly when you do smallish bursts like I did. With larger bursts, say 10-12 bullets, it will take longer. Honestly, though, you’re just trading time around if you do 4 bursts of 6 instead of 2 bursts of 12. You’re waiting for 2 long periods or 4 short periods, but I think you’re dealing with the same amount of time overall. Plus you don’t have to wait after the 2^nd 12 round burst, because you’d just switch to the DE or a secondary if the target was alive.The reason you’d choose one over the other is if you needed to factor in accuracy. Obviously a 12 round burst will be pretty inaccurate for medium-long range shooting, but perfectly usable for close range.

So how do you know what to shoot when? By using a crosshair that shows spread, and linking in your mind how big the crosshair is when you start to not hit. I like cg_drawcrosshair “7″ so I’m going to say you should use that. Once you know how to deal with spread and recoil, you can use whatever you want. Just play around with bursting at enemies at different ranges. After several full games (I recommend CTF or TDM, because TS is just too few kills per game), you should have an idea of how many bullets you should shoot in each burst at a given range. Make sure you push the limit so you know what the limit is. You’re not going for score, you’re getting practice. The only way you can fully learn something is to find what the limits are. If you don’t want to tarnish your name with a few bad games, use an alias, but I promise that if you’re spamming now (or shooting too conservatively), you will actually play better once you start bursting.

I said spam has a place, and it does. Up close, you need to spam. Once you’ve got the aiming down pat, you’ll find you’re not actually spamming in the typical use of the word, because you will never empty your clip to kill someone. I just want to impress upon you that when an enemy is in your face, you need to forget about bursting, and just start shooting. Between 0 and about 10 feet away from you, there is absolutely no advantage to bursting, statistically speaking. You’re close enough that the spread will rarely cause your bullets to be directed past your enemy if you’re aimed at them. If you’re not hitting, it’s because you’re not aimed at your target. That said, Urban Terror has difficulty calculating player positions and hits at extremely close distances, particularly with ping times over 50 ms. Thus there’s not really any reason not to spam.

Basically you’re going to be developing a repertoire of bursts for every situation. You’ll have everything from single shot tapping for people far across the map, to no-holds-barred spamming for close quarters combat. Forget your knife, spamming works better in this situation. To help you during this development process, I’ll give you a simple rule: if the crosshair (size 20, crosshair 7) is bigger than the enemy, you need to do a smaller burst next time. You want to know how to judge spread, when to end your burst, and when to start your next burst without watching the crosshair size, which is why you need to practice bursting. Yes, you want to be watching your crosshair for aiming, but that’s all. Of course at longer ranges where you’ll never let the crosshair get big enough to exit your area of visual focus (you’ll be focused at the middle of your crosshair for aiming, and the middle is usually a dot which doesn’t move with spread, as it’s the middle, duuuh:P), you can cheat a little and watch the size of it, but remember that the crosshair doesn’t really show spread that accurately (sorry for the awful puns lol). Plus the less you have to visually process, the better. If you’re wondering why I didn’t mention recoil, that’s because it drops back to normal really quickly, so if you’re controlling burst, you’re controlling recoil. There really isn’t much need in Urban Terror to actively counter recoil, because at any range where you run the risk of the crosshair rising enough to leave the target (requires your target to be far away, and thus small on your screen), you would have to generate way too much spread to actually stand a decent chance of hitting the enemy to make it worth correcting for recoil.

I don’t really know where to put this next paragraph, but its topic comes up a lot: accuracy stat. In the stats tab, you will see your accuracy for the round with your most-used gun. Some people put a lot of stock into this, but the truth is, it’s not that important. I shoot around 22-27% most days. Looking at past screenshots of tough matches against strong opponents, I outshot both my team and the opponent. Now these aren’t any old players; this is against clans like /VeX/ and Veneration, and my team won, so obviously my teammates were exceptional players too. I’m shooting 22% or maybe even less (I like to shoot at corners as I’m retreating, sort of like suppressive fire) against top players, and I’m still racking up huge amounts of kills. Some people would say 22% is bad. It’s not. If I’m shooting 1000 bullets and 22% hit, and someone else is shooting at 30% but only 600 bullets, I’m killing more. People worry too much about their accuracy stat. Yes, you want to hit as much as possible, that’s what I’ve been teaching you to do. But you need to not do that at the cost of speed. If you’re taking too long to kill enemies because you’re shooting too cautiously, you’re not playing as well as you can. I think 18% and over is what you should set as a goal. If you’re shooting at higher than that right now, make it your goal to keep or improve that stat while also increasing your killing speed (how fast you rack up kills during a round). Your ideal accuracy is that at which you don’t have to alter your gameplay. As you get better, you’ll probably find your accuracy stat goes up. I shoot high 20s in pubs, and can do 30s when I try to aim. Without slowing down my gameplay. I couldn’t do this 2 years ago. Looking at the players whom I’ve seen champion high accuracy, I don’t see any particularly good players, either. Don’t be intimidated if some clan says you’re not shooting a high enough accuracy stat…especially if you’re outkilling them.;)

Getting your setup in order

So now we’ve got the aiming and shooting down, it’s time to address your hardware and software. Your mouse is the most important piece of hardware when it comes to shooting. Well, if you have a bad PC which lags, that’s more dire, but I’ll assume most people don’t, because PCs are really cheap these days. If your PC can’t run UrT well, most likely it’s even slower in other apps. Even if you don’t have a good computer, you have hopefully tweaked your graphics config.

So, your mouse. If you’re using a ball mouse, you really need to replace that. Forget UrT, a ball mouse is just plain awful. Optical and laser mice are a massive improvement. I prefer laser mice since they work well on any surface, and use less power in a wireless configuration. However, optical mice are good too. Logitech makes some nice gaming mice, as do Razer and Steelseries. All those things like DPI and on-the-fly sensitivity are pretty worthless, so you don’t actually need to spend a lot. You can get a G5 for around $40 CDN, so that’s like 25€ or around $37 USD. Just wait for a sale and get a nice mouse. You should probably go into an electronics store like Future Shop or Best Buy to try how different mice feel. Obviously buy them online because those stores just price rape you, but knowing how a mouse feels in your hand is very important. Features to look for include Teflon feet and a nice long cord (6’ or more is good). USB is important too, because PS/2 is just a PITA since you can’t hotplug it without having to reboot. I use 650 DPI on my G5, and I don’t know of any good player who uses anything over 800, so you don’t need 5000 DPI or something.

A mousepad is important too. I say this as person who used their desk surface ever since I bought my first optical (MX700) mouse. A mousepad helps…somehow. I can’t tell you what improved, just I know my scores went up and my accuracy went up. I guess it produces a more uniform surface for the laser. An optical mice of course needs a mousepad or it will skip randomly. It depends on your desk surface for the optical mice I guess, since I used the MX700 without a pad and it did okay, but I have some cheapo Logitech PS/2 mice and they skip (rather jump to a random corner of my screen at the MOST ANNOYING TIMES POSSIBLE, like right before I finish slowly creeping up to an icon, hoping it won’t skip away) really bad without a pad. A pad also gives something to rest your wrist on, and makes your mouse glide smoother.

I have a Steelseries QCK; apparently some of the glass pads don’t play nice with a laser. It was only $8 CAD with free shipping, but it’s pretty good. It slides around constantly so I always have to drag it back to the edge of my desk, but that’s not really a problem since I just do it when I’m respawning every 10 minutes or so. It gets a bit dirty from dust and stuff (it’s black, and cloth; you do the math), not to mention bits of dead skin (:X). But it’s easy to shake off and apparently machine washable. It’s about 12.5” x 10.5” so it’s really big; I’ve never run off it, or indeed even gone more than 4” close to the right hand edge. There’s a bigger version which is like 16” across if you really need that lol. So there’s my QCK review! I recommend it as a cheap mousepad, but if you want to spend more, you could get one of those aluminum or glass ones. They probably wouldn’t slide so much, or at least would be more accepting of being taped down (if I put sticky pads on this, it’d make the surface uneven seeing as the mousepad is just rubber+cloth).

As far as software goes, you’ll want to disable mouse acceleration in Windows, as mouseaccel will cause you to have non-linear movement response. BAD. Many mouse driver software control panels will let you do this. Logitech’s Setpoint does, for example. Otherwise you should just Google “disable mouse accel vista/xp/7” replacing the last bit with your OS. Take the quotes off too. For XP there is a registry fix that works, probably called CPL Mouse Accel Fix or something similar, as many CPL players apparently used it. I’m not sure there is actually a way to disable it in Vista, or indeed if Vista even has mouse accel on by default. I applied a registry fix to my Vista 64 installation, but I never noticed a difference. To be honest I didn’t notice one with XP either, and in fact I stopped bothering to patch my system with the fix after every reformatting by the end of my tenure with XP. Still, it’s better to make sure it’s off.

Getting good settings for Urban Terror is important, obviously. We’ve covered which crosshair to use while you’re experimenting with spread, but there are more things you can do. A good crosshair color is important. I like to make sure it stands out against my enemies. I use cg_crosshairrgb “1 0 0 1” against Blue team, and cg_crosshairrgb “0 1 1 1” against Red. That’s red and cyan, respectively. I just change it in the menu, but I really should add some lines to my autoexec to make it a script. Oh well. White is another good color, as are pink and lime (green). I used pink for several years as it worked well in version 3.x, but with the new skin colors (orange for Red team…), it was a bit hard to see. I know many people in my clan use white, and I’ve found it’s a pretty good alternative to using a different color for each team. I’ve used green sometimes too and found it works well.

I’m purposely not discussing mouse settings beyond /sensitivity. I do not think changing x and y response so they’re different is a good idea. I prefer a constant response which I can always predict. Make sure you have /cl_mouseaccel set to 0. Mouse accel, as discussed above, is a dreadful feature which really has no purpose.

Parting thoughts

I hope I’ve done a good job explaining how to properly operate your automatic weapon.:) It takes a lot of time and effort to become a good gunner, but that’s the only way it will happen. I can tell you how to shoot your gun and give you tips to improve your aim, but you have to be the one to put them to use. Good luck!

Post updated November 24, 2009. Fixed a few typos and reworded a few sentences for clarity. No content change.

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