Kart Krew's Smart Tether 4.0

Inspired by Knuckles' Chaotix and Sonic Classic Heroes, this addon ties players together so everyone can experience the levels together, and adds some fun momentum shenanigans. Take a few friends through the campaign again and combine your abilities together to take crazy new routes!

This is a completely redone from scratch take on the concept, using none of the old code. The new take makes the band much "smarter" than before, taking into consideration where players are trying to go much more, and reducing a lot of the frustration of the older versions.

Was developed as a side-project, with my Kart Krew buddies doing a lot of feedback, testing, and feature suggestions.
VelocitOni helped with a lot of the game design direction (he helped make Sonic Classic Heroes' tether feel good too!), and contributed several sprites & special effects to make it look cool as hell.
Jeck Jims and Chromatian did lots of testing, and helped a lot by being able to host while I can't.
aaand all of the other regulars in the dev voice chats who kept me company!

Features:

• Customizable party sizes!
• Sonic Classic Heroes style pulling, which avoiding pulls players back, never pulls players down, and anchors players that are using their abilities.
• Kick off walls when being dragged into them, to give yourself more control over a situation, and
• HOLD! in place, then release to slingshot off your party at blazing speed!
• Everything's shared between your team, from rings, lives, shields, and even dash mode!
• Drag non-spin characters into spin gaps to make them roll under, allowing for more unique path combinations!

Controls:

• Wall Kick: Press Jump when being dragged into a wall to kick off of it. You can tell when you can wall kick when dust particles show up. Hold Move Forward to kick up, or Move Backwards to kick down. Move Left and Move Right also influence the direction.
• HOLD!: Keep Custom 1 pressed to hold yourself in place. When used in the air, you will get stronger gravity. Release when the band has tension to slingshot.
• Respawn: Hold down Toss Flag for 3 seconds to respawn on top of a random teammate. Keep held to stay in the respawn state.

Console variables:

• tether_players: Changes the number of players per party. Defaults to "2". Set to "max" to group everyone together. Change to the group size you're most comfortable with! Setting to "1" disables Tether Coop entirely.
• tether_specialstages: By default, Special Stages are disabled in Tether Coop, because the base game's Special Stages didn't feel very enjoyable when tied together, and we found it obnoxious when testing map packs without custom Special Stages. If you disagree though, you can set this to "Yes" to re-enable them. Otherwise, by default, you will just get Chaos Emeralds for picking up Emerald Tokens.
• tether_colorpartners: By default, matching colors with someone will try to make the team organizer put you on the same team. Change to "Off" to disable this feature.
• tether_randomize: When enabled, teams will be scrambled between maps. This will still respect color partners. Defaults to "On".
• tether_controlhelp: Shows button prompts on the HUD describing all of the actions you can preform. Change to "Off" if you find it too cluttered.

Known Issues:

• Game Over will have one player respawned at the proper checkpoint, and everyone else respawned at the start of the map. I could not find a (good) way to detect a MapChange caused by Game Over restart, so I left it as is.
• May or may not work in any game modes except Cooperative. There is rudimentary support for it to work in PvP modes like Race, but it's completely untested.

Custom Character Support:

• Most characters will not need to do anything! To ensure a custom ability counts for anchoring, you just need to set "player.panim" to "PA_ABILITY" or "PA_ABILITY2", but they don't require it either (and in some cases, it might be better to omit it if it's really overwhelming!).
• Characters can supply a custom HOLD! pose with "SPR2_HOLD". By default, it will use their edge animation.