Will Sonic retain his nerfed Thok and Acceleration abilities shown in F. Sonic?
No, Sonic will continue to have the same abilities as he does in 2.1.
Will Tails finally have unique swimming animations? Also, will his tails be separate sprites like in TailsCD?
I can't remember offhand, but with our new system for character sprites it's definitely *possible* for us to have swim sprites now.
And yes, they will be.
I thought I heard from somewhere that a lot of old and unused assets will be removed. Is this true?
Not quite: a lot of old assets were upgraded or replaced rather than just "removed". Unused assets don't tend to be removed from the game, a lot of them are there for modders to use in the first place (such as our large collection of level textures or flats).
In your opinion, do you think this update will be bigger than v2.0?
Depends on what you mean: bigger than the changes between 1.09.4 and 2.0? Or 2.0 itself with the amount of content it has altogether?
...actually I guess it would be "yes" either way lol. But I suspect not as dramatic as 2.0 was compared to 1.09.4, whatever the case. But still a big change.
Will the server selection screen be updated? If so, will it show more information currently only shown on the Master Server website?
We haven't touched that much recently IIRC.
Is MotorRoach redoing the current textures and flats in addition to the character sprites?
No, MotorRoach's expertise is making sprites rather than textures/flats anyway. Other people on our team are indeed redoing many of our textures and flats though.
Will there be any new Easter Eggs in v2.2? (If so, don't spoil them)
I'm probably not the best person to know what our plans for those are so I'll skip this one lol.
About the music tracks being altered, will the silence in the beginning of some MIDI tracks be removed? Also, will the pitch of THZ1's MIDI track be updated?
As already stated, this is to do with loading the MIDI mostly (though I added some gaps to the few MIDIs I made for the game I guess, so that they played back properly).
As for THZ1's MIDI, I don't even make MIDIs anymore so I suspect it probably won't be changed at all (but I could be wrong). Whoever made the digital version clearly decided to divert from the MIDI a fair bit, it's also got some synth pads the MIDI doesn't have. =P
Since the cloud textures in Greenflower Zone are being changed, will this cause the clouds on the title screen to be changed, too?
That and quite a bit more. =P
Does this update contain enough internal changes to break most mods?
The new palette alone will obviously require everyone to update all graphics. Apart from that, we've made some changes to options and variables for SOC and Lua, and the setup for some map special effects were changed. But otherwise you *may* just about get away with not updating, very possibly.
Unless the mod is a character wad, that is.
Will the Character Select be removed in favor of choosing characters on the file select screen?
No. I think we've even improved the character select a little for 2.2.
Haha, they're too good for this world. You will likely never receive them in your lifetime, mere mortal. =)
(of course I could be wrong)