How to jump

Ponyplay implies steeples and those imply jumps. There are different ways to do jumps, and different parameters can affect the way you jump

1. Quickjump

Quickjump is a way to improve your AO (Animation Override) and this is not allowed in the PFS ponyplay community. Considered as cheat, the last generation of slalom system can detect it. Any abuse will be reprimanded, you have been warned.

1.1. Firestorm settings

From Firestorm you can find the setting under Avatar/Movement, this one have to be turned off (unchecked)

2. Butt grab or ML

Everyone has their own preference here, both works. You have to figure out in which mode you are comfier and stick to hit to improve with time your accuracy and overall performance.

3. Jump's steps

In a first approach, making your avatar jump over steeple looks like very easy. In the reality the process is way more complicated, we will explore the different steps of a jump in SL.

3.1. Your reaction time

This time is depending on how fast you figure out you are at the right distance of the steeple and you want to press the jump key. This time is around 1s but everyone is different.

3.2. Ping

The ping is the time to send your message to the server that requests a response. Measured in milliseconds, it's the round trip time for the message to reach the SL server and for the response to return to you. Ping response times are important because they add overhead to any requests made over the Internet.

The ping time is function of:

• Your location. SL AWS servers are located in Oregon (USA) and the distance from you to there will give you a time you cannot change, it's the speed of the light vs distance plus some gateway times. Europeans will deal with a time around 200ms where Americans can get down to 20ms.
  
• The topology of the network. If your provider decides to go over space with satellites instead of using the fiber optics of the ground. A geostationary satellite at 30.000 km from the earth have typically ping time of 600ms and Starlink uses a network of satellites located at 500 km from the earth with a ping between 30 and 100ms.
  
• The type of network you use at your home. Will all prefer Wifi because you can sit where your want and don't need to fight with that silly ethernet cable. But a wireless network adds some latency and may increase your ping time up to 50ms.
  
• The quality of your provider and the charge of the internet network. Some are better some as worse, hard to tell which one to use.
  

How to check your ping time? just hit ctrl+shift+1 in firestorm and you will get this:

My ping time from France to Oregon is 191ms

3.2. Pre-jump

The prejump is happening as soon you hit the jump key, this animation is played for 33ms before making the avatar jump in the air. Enabling Quickjump will shortcut this and you can easily figure out why it is not allowed in ponyplay. In a laggy place or in case you use a complex AO, the pre-jump may take longer, so watch out what you do or use here, 2 differents AO may give you 2 different results. We recommend the use of the integrated Firestorm AO which needs to be populated with animations.

3.3. Jump

There you go, you finally went through all the steps before seeing the avatar going to air. You can release the jump key now and feel free to steer the avatar in the air to correct your trajectory. SL jump lasts 2.5s.

On flat ground, a jump is faster than walking but a jump is slower than running.

3.4. Landing

When your avatar touch the floor the land animation will be played during 0.4s

4. Repeating jumps

In case you have several steeples close enough to repeat the jump without any need to walk you can anticipate the next jump. No need to keep pressed or you will fly!

5. Reduce jump length

In case two steeples are too close to jumping them with two normal repeating jumps and not close enough to jump them only with one jump, you can pull the handbrake in the air, aka spacebar. Pressing the spacebar even in just a short time will help you to reduce the length of your jump.

6. Space jump

If your avatar hit a bump during the pre-jump phase, your avatar may jump way higher than the normal jump. This so-called "space jump" needs a lot of practice to master it but once you get it right you may use it on some steeples to improve your time, like the famous PFS Broken Hooves steeple.

7. Training

Training is the key to success, you may meet other ponies way more skilled than you, don't be ashamed of your result, they certainly train on a daily basis for several hours. You can train too by using the Jumping training located at PFS.