SRB2's picking up news coverage... again.

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That's actually not a problem on their end. We need to either remove analog or fix it. Not their fault the mode sucks. It's only their fault if they knew about the difference and used it anyways.
 
I like watching other people play through the game, because it puts a beacon on SRB2's biggest weaknesses. While I'll always see SRB2 as a great game, its fatal flaw has always been the controls.

While I do think we should eventually patch up the controls for analog/controllers, in the meantime I think we should make some sort of splash screen on the intro saying "Keyboard and mouse recommended!" I think that would alleviate a lot of growing pains for any newcomers going into the game wondering what to do.
 
I second Colbalt, purely because people know Sonic as a console franchise and thus people expect that Sonic games are best played with a gamepad. It should be clearer that SRB2 is modeled off an FPS game.
 
Honestly I think the default control scheme should be the standard FPS mouselook + WASD (is it like that already?) so we don't have to suffer through videos like these. And the default mouselook speed is asinine IIRC. It's such a shame that SRB2's few moments in the spotlight have to look so crappy because the people playing it are clueless and the default scheme is so awkward. Imagine if they knew what they were doing and making the game look as good as it can be :'(

Granted, there's a high skill ceiling for playing well as sonic, which is a good thing... but good games give players a glimpse and a taste of how skillful movement could be. SRB2 does not!

Partly at fault, which hasn't really been addressed here, is that Sonic is too fast and that thokking propels the player too far forward. I mean, how long has Sonic's speed parameters stayed the same? Was it an arbitrary value that we all just got used to and just kinda accepted? Of all the things the developers have put their time and energy into, I think maybe movement speed has been overlooked. People resonate more with controlling tails in these videos, even though the scheme is identical. It's because he's slower. And lamer, so people don't really pick him. Maybe the game would benefit all-around for old and new players alike if we dialed back the speed on all the characters more than a few notches. I think Sonic having a top speed at Tails', perhaps a tiny bit higher, would be perfect.
 
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I do believe I've gone over all the ways I could think to fix analog and the issue of new players choosing Sonic, but nobody seemed to think they were good ideas (at least not to impliment into vanilla) so I'm curious about what everyone else has to say.
 
Add an analog-specific linedef that transitions from one camera angle to another. This camera angle should be able to be set in a certain place that follows the player, or have it follow the player from behind, thus aleviating some of the need to have the player manually turn the camera.
(I would impliment this myself as an addon as Mystic suggested later in the same thread but I'm not skilled enough to make it a reality, however chi.miru has made essentially the same thing and I would link the gif but the dropbox link is broken)

As well as an addon that never got publicly released, the premise of which was similar to Stat Adjuster for Circuit Returns by Salt, it changed every character other than Sonic to be slightly slower whilst taking away his Thok and slightly reducing his top speed.

My reasoning was that the natural tradeoff of the character abilities (Knuckles' glide cutting his speed to his initial actionspd, and Tails' ability slowing him down with each press of the jump button) are supposed to already be enough to balance themselves out without hindering their runspeed in the process, whilst keeping sonic as the "fastest thing alive" that he's supposed to be through sheer running speed and skill, though this would require a speed cap mechanic that is different from the current vanilla one in order to function well.

Mystic has stated that he wants to keep the Thok due to its very easy-to-understand nature for beginners and would gladly replace it with something even more OP if it was just as easily understood.

Looking back I can see why the mod wasn't released, aside from a few minor asthetics to make the animations more closely follow the ones from the MegaDrive/Genesis games, the script didn't do much else besides modify a few default values. If I could finish it with a lot more gameplay-changing tweaks it might get through, I doubt it though.
 
I like watching other people play through the game, because it puts a beacon on SRB2's biggest weaknesses. While I'll always see SRB2 as a great game, its fatal flaw has always been the controls.

I very much agree with watching new people play SRB2. I especially love it when it happens on YouTube because I can just go "See, look at what happens here. This is great/a horrible problem." Several internal suggestions I've made have come about because of this.

The bottom line when it comes down to controls, though, is not having a solid grasp on what is intuitive. One of the biggest complaints is "the controls are slippery." That may sound like useful feedback, but the question then becomes "what are unslippery controls supposed to feel like" "how much traction is too much traction" "how does this work with, say, a gamepad vs a keyboard?" We are actually trying multiple approaches in 2.2 to make the game way easier to ease into, up to and including a blatant tutorial level (though we have said this already). What we have not talked about are several other things we are working on to try and make the game more intuitive for people, and unfortunately some of those ideas are not finished implementation yet so I don't really wanna talk about them too much. The issue is largely "we aren't 100% sure of where all the problems lie, with 2.2 we will address as many as we can find and see what happens."
 
Haven't you guys considered that covering the floor for community reactions to the controls would be a better idea? Like publish a source code mod that messes with the controls' traction or something. I know it's weird and awkward (and also rude) for me to say this but uh the devs can't be the only people to see what does work and what doesn't at least in this situation. It's an mass-wide SRB2 problem, and having us lowly community players help you guys see what controls are better can seem slightly helpful for 2.2's case.
 
You are aware that the source code is publicly available, right? There is nothing stopping anyone from trying to find a control setup that works. It's also not like we never use community developed features in the game. We actually frequently do. Anyone can dick around with it as much as they please and if they find something that works, it's not unreasonable to assume we might consider adding it to the main game. It's also not like we ignore community input or feedback, otherwise we wouldn't respond to topics like this and gather user feedback to fix issues.

So I'm not even sure what your issue is here, but your tone is god awful, passive aggressive, and rude. You even admitted as much in your post. And posted it regardless knowing it would probably draw ire for no good reason, so an infraction it is.

I don't object to people criticizing how we do things, but when you post things like referring to yourself as "us lowly community players" as a negative insinuation about our character in blatant disregard of that, in the very same topic, we are trying to explain the issue and devise a solution to the problem through feedback, there's a problem. And it's not with our methods of doing things.
 
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Alright that post I made beforehand​ was in fact poorly made, what I meant to say was that the community could at least test the new controls beforehand to have a better opinion on the subject and help create the smooth and non-slippery control these random YouTubers and new players were hopefully looking for in SRB2.
 
Well, the real issue is that the people we need to test this stuff explicitly AREN'T people who are in the community. We have been doing occasional testing of these changes on people, but those people are people who aren't connected to SRB2 to begin with and therefore don't have the experience with the controls that long-time players have.

As an example, one of the things we're messing with is an "automatic braking" option. Essentially, when enabled, anytime the player releases the controls, the game automatically puts in control input to try to stop. Older players (read: everyone reading this thread) would have no use for this and turn it off, but new players often struggle heavily with stopping in SRB2, and automatic braking makes the game operate a lot more like the official Sonic games.

The goal here isn't to improve the controls for our long-time players. You guys already have those controls nailed down! The goal here is to teach NEW players how to use our controls more effectively so they can have fun playing our game quickly. The complicated nuance that our game controls have for experts can wait; we need to teach players the basics, and that's something we've traditionally failed at pretty hard.
 
I think Sonic having a top speed at Tails', perhaps a tiny bit higher, would be perfect.

If that was worked into SRB2, I think there should then be an unlockable character that moves at ~Sonic's current speed, because I love going fast. Maybe that would be asking a bit much though, seeing as there hasn't been a new character for, like, ten years.
 
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Well, the real issue is that the people we need to test this stuff explicitly AREN'T people who are in the community. We have been doing occasional testing of these changes on people, but those people are people who aren't connected to SRB2 to begin with and therefore don't have the experience with the controls that long-time players have.

As an example, one of the things we're messing with is an "automatic braking" option. Essentially, when enabled, anytime the player releases the controls, the game automatically puts in control input to try to stop. Older players (read: everyone reading this thread) would have no use for this and turn it off, but new players often struggle heavily with stopping in SRB2, and automatic braking makes the game operate a lot more like the official Sonic games.

The goal here isn't to improve the controls for our long-time players. You guys already have those controls nailed down! The goal here is to teach NEW players how to use our controls more effectively so they can have fun playing our game quickly. The complicated nuance that our game controls have for experts can wait; we need to teach players the basics, and that's something we've traditionally failed at pretty hard.

I wonder if we shouldn't also look into customizing strafe controls, because I can't help but notice how unwieldy strafe-running looks whenever I watch a new guy use WASD controls.
 
As someone who regularly plays with a controller, I would say the default control scheme works the best for me. At one point I set up my controls to match a regular 3D platformer (played with analog and set up my right control stick for the camera movement while the bumpers panned the camera) and I can say it was REALLY awkward. I'm not sure if it was me but I felt like I kept slamming into things and getting myself killed. Although I will say the camera panning is pretty slow and I cant have it keep up when I'm going fast. It might just be because I'm used to the regular no analog gameplay though.
 
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