In Source, a player can only stand on a angled surface if it is less than 45.573° from the horizontal. If the slope is greater than this, the player slides down it. However, if the player holds the direction key pointing into the slope, they can stall themselves from falling and remain “airborne” without actually moving downwards. This can be exploited by increasing the air acceleration value to allow the player to convert their downwards speed into horizontal speed, and their horizontal speed into upwards speed.
A spinoff mode formed from the Surf game mode, players can create and complete sequences of locations to surf to, known as tricks, for XP and bragging rights.
Unlike regular surf, tricksurf typically has loosely defined goals that are not intentionally placed by the author of the surf map. Sometimes the most fun part of tricksurf is developing new tricks that are flashy and difficult, and then challenging your friends.
Before you start to create your ramps in hammer, there are a few factors you should consider:
How steep do I want the ramps to be?
A ramp that is too steep / wide may be considered awkward to board.
People tend to use a 5:4 ratio for the dimensions of their ramps
What size do I want for my ramps?
People may find themselves sliding off the bottoms of small ramps.
They may feel like they are going slow on oversized ramps, it is important to find a balance.
How do I want to detail my ramps?
Will models be needed to achieve the visual style, or can it be brushes?
These characteristics of your ramps will inevitably be refined through testing, but it is a good idea to start off with a plan for how you want the surf to feel.
Look at different surf maps that you enjoy and try to get an idea of how exactly you want yours to pan out.
