Quake:
Maneuvres
Abbreviation: RJ.
A set of the most fundamental maneuvres in Quake, which involves such a massive degree of flexibility and diversity it has become an art unto itself.
In its most general form, a rocket jump involves using the blast radius from a rocket combined with a jump to gain an arbitrary velocity at the sacrifice of health or armor (see splash damage).
The applications involve using it to get to inaccessible portions of a map, quickly accelerate to high yet controllable speeds, (which can subsequently be used to pursue or escape from enemies, or maneuvre into a better position), and to take time-saving shortcuts. This extra mobility leads to a massive advantage in all forms of Quake.
A simple rocket jump is performed by wielding a rocket launcher, pointing straight down at the floor, and simultaneously jumping and firing, which causes one to be launched into the air. More complex methods include pointing to the side and moving in the opposite direction to launch the player upwards and sideways, as well as utlising map architecture and geography.
History
Historically the rocket jump originates from the original Quake (Well it's not like you're going to rocket jump in oldschool non-Z-Doom now). Generally it was first seen in DM2 as a shortcut to get the Quad Damage (rocket jumping up to another platform as opposed to traditionally having to make a 20 second run to get to the upper tiers of the level) When John Carmack saw it he was reputed to say "That move is going to be particularly effective". How very very right.
From there, the technique of rocket jumping has gradually evolved into a very fine art. Gone are the old days of simply looking down, firing and jumping. Now, as pointed out by flamingweasel, people can shoot a rocket behind or sideways in order to gain horizontal velocity (although this does not necessarily require flick aim).
The Form
Nowadays, with good handling, timing and skill, one has complete control over the direction and magnitude of velocity of a rocket jump. This is especially important due to the fact that a rocket jump costs health and armor. With up to 50 damage per hit, the price of a rocket jump is not cheap
Essentially there are 3 broad forms of rocket jumping: height, length and speed. Height and length involve attempting to bypass an obstacle that is too high, too long, or both, for conventional movement. Although they occur, it is very rarely optimal to perform a rocket jump that is purely for height, or purely for length. A rocket jump almost always involves movement in both height and length, and as the magnitudes are tradeoffs between one another, a good rocket jump is a mix and match.
The other form of jumping is for speed, where the objective is to very quickly gain a high horizontal velocity, usually to perform bunnyhopping. This is different from the former rocket jump as one wants high speed but a very low height, so these are often performed by firing into walls and other player-height architectures.
Physics
Oh yeah won't this part be fun. I'll update as soon as I find my quake source :)
Part of the Quake metanode
It's unlikely
Jeremy f's script will work in Quake3 as there is no longer an
alias command. Substituting with seta might work however.
Rocket jumping with optical mice brings up an important issue with their use in general. True, you can compensate for their annoying anti-spin by simply lowering your sensitivity, but this in itself is a critically limiting factor in gameplay, especially for those of us who like to flick aim - you're essentially turning slower, so you're response rate is hampered. This, and the fact that the optical mouse's vaunted 69 billion samples per second is probably some incredibly shoddy up version of m_filter, is the main reason I'm keeping my balls. For the puritannical of you, note that a ball mouse can exhibit the same characteristics, however the max spin threshold is simply higher.