Suggestions

CobaltBW said:
The tokens being changed to give continues were overkill, IMO. I think the continue mechanics that were set in place such as the increasing starting lives and the ease of racking up continues in special stages already helped a lot to make the lategame a little more accessible. Most people who already have all emeralds are at the point not to where they need continues, but that they need rings. Not only does the new continue behavior replacing the 50 rings bonus discourage me from seeking the tokens out after I've found all emeralds, but it means I can't take advantage of them in netplay, where rings are already tight when trying to maintain super.

Maybe I'm wrong and there's someone out there who needed the continues from tokens, but it seems pretty unlikely to me, and I feel like the removal of the 50 rings bonus negatively impacts the collectible in the late/end game in ways where it really counts.
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Honestly I completely agree. I never go after tokens anymore because I have all the emeralds as all the characters, and I never get game overs (except for racing Metal as Fang) so I never really feel like there's anything to gain from it. It feels like a pointless detour for an item that I don't need anymore.
 
Mystic said:
The actual reason is because of the longer-term goal to make it such that you can get record attack emblems in normal play. Thus the extra 50 rings was a problem. Continues happen to also be unobtainable otherwise after collecting all the emeralds, so it seemed like the right replacement.
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The former issue could easily be resolved by making it so tokens grant rings except under record attack. That wouldn't exactly be unprecedented, since the player doesn't have any emeralds to trigger the 50 rings condition in record attack anyway.

You could potentially rectify the latter issue by making it so special stages aren't the sole way to collect continues -- I recall that the classics made it so that you could get a continue by completing an act fast enough. (EDIT: Alternatively, perhaps making it so tokens reward an immediate 50 rings, but also reward a continue at the end of the stage)
 
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CobaltBW said:
The former issue could easily be resolved by making it so tokens grant rings except under record attack. That wouldn't exactly be unprecedented, since the player doesn't have any emeralds to trigger the 50 rings condition in record attack anyway.

You could potentially rectify the latter issue by making it so special stages aren't the sole way to collect continues -- I recall that the classics made it so that you could get a continue by completing an act fast enough. (EDIT: Alternatively, perhaps making it so tokens reward an immediate 50 rings, but also reward a continue at the end of the stage)
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I think you misunderstood Mystic's post. It looks like the goal is to make Record Attack save records during normal play. As in, the first time you play through the campaign, your best time, best rings, etc. are automatically added to Record Attack and you earn the respective emblems.
 
CobaltBW said:
Couldn't we just make it so that tokens always grant 50 rings during Record Attack, then?
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I imagine that would break the balance of the Ring emblems. And if you added ~100 rings to each current target it would partially defeat the purpose of making Record Attack available in normal play because the only way to get the Ring emblems would be to collect all Chaos Emeralds first. Not to mention the Ring emblems just turn into another "find the secret hidden tokens" challenge.
 
Well, a couple things I should point out:

1) If you can get RA emblems in normal play, then that potentially opens the door to times that can only be achieved by turning Super. It may not be a point of consideration right now since Tails is currently the best at time attacking most stages, but would this not be a consideration if Sonic or Metal Sonic is found to be the best speedrunner in several stages?
2) Ring Attack emblems are loose enough to where there are multiple strategies for collecting rings. You shouldn't need to raise the ring requirement for any stages, or at least not by much, if your goal is to let the player find their own way to beat the emblem. Besides, I don't know all of the token locations as it is, so ring hunting might encourage me to find them!
 
I'm not sure if this feedback is all that helpful, but personally I don't see a reason for making Record Attack emblems available in normal play. Getting the emblems in Record Attack mode is the only incentive I even feel for playing that mode, moving the emblems to being obtainable in normal play would strip that entirely for me.

I also really like how you are rewarded for playing all the different single player modes with emblems, so in general I would rather not have those emblems relocated to the main campaign.
 
CobaltBW said:
Well, a couple things I should point out:

1) If you can get RA emblems in normal play, then that potentially opens the door to times that can only be achieved by turning Super. It may not be a point of consideration right now since Tails is currently the best at time attacking most stages, but would this not be a consideration if Sonic or Metal Sonic is found to be the best speedrunner in several stages?
2) Ring Attack emblems are loose enough to where there are multiple strategies for collecting rings. You shouldn't need to raise the ring requirement for any stages, or at least not by much, if your goal is to let the player find their own way to beat the emblem. Besides, I don't know all of the token locations as it is, so ring hunting might encourage me to find them!
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If I were designing it, I'd just disable records if you go Super. It would already be disabled if you died mid-level after all. In theory, you could disable records if you collect an emerald token, but that's less intuitively understandable than "Super doesn't count".

As for your second point, I honestly agree. I was making an argument based on "balance", but I, personally, don't really care about balance. I actually think the Ring emblems should exist more as half-"freebies" so that less skilled players can still collect enough emblems to unlock everything of value if they put enough time into it.
 
Unknownlight said:
If I were designing it, I'd just disable records if you go Super. It would already be disabled if you died mid-level after all. In theory, you could disable records if you collect an emerald token, but that's less intuitively understandable than "Super doesn't count".
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"Super doesn't count" isn't all that intuitive either! But that's part of the problem here: in order to justify RA emblems being achieved through normal play, it forces us to make some compromises to certain elements that would otherwise be beneficial to normal play, like tokens rewarding rings.

It seems like the easiest way to resolve this would be to keep RA emblems and normal play separate from each other, as much as I see the appeal of trying to co-adapt the two.
 
CobaltBW said:
"Super doesn't count" isn't all that intuitive either! But that's part of the problem here: in order to justify RA emblems being achieved through normal play, it forces us to make some compromises to certain elements that would otherwise be beneficial to normal play, like tokens rewarding rings.

It seems like the easiest way to resolve this would be to keep RA emblems and normal play separate from each other, as much as I see the appeal of trying to co-adapt the two.
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The thing is, you can turn that logic around. Making emerald tokens award 50 rings forces compromises like not allowing RA to work during normal gameplay.

It all depends on what you value more. I really like the idea of RA in normal gameplay—I suggested it before so I'm happy that Mystic said it's something he's looking into. Especially now that the game has 6 characters with individually-tracked records, I want it to show my actual best times and such rather than just when I happened to be playing Record Attack.
 
Is there a way to only use the mouse in-game? It gets very irritating when I'm trying to adjust the screen resolution, since the settings are default on my smaller monitor (I use two monitors) & moving the mouse moves the menu cursor. Making it difficult to move the game screen to my larger monitor.
 
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It should be made possible to patch a skin's "availability" value using P_SKIN. Currently, it's possible to set it when adding a skin with S_SKIN (see ~LINK~ for the relevant source code in v2.2.0), but it's not possible to change it when patching an existing skin with P_SKIN (see ~LINK~ for a lack of relevant source code in v2.2.0).


Cons:
- It'd make it possible to make all skins unavailable, which would of course be a bad thing, but this would be a mod-author error, not a mod-user error, so that's a moot point.
- It'd make it possible to make unlockable skins available using mods... but, the same can be said about just creating a completely new duplicate of an existing skin, so that's a moot point too.

Pros:
- It'd make it possible to, for example, change characters which are available by default, which are unavailable by default, and how unavailable ones would be unlocked if so. I can see a use for this in some kind of Sonic Adventure-style mod, where you start with just Sonic, and have to unlock Tails and Knuckles by being good at video games or such.
- It'd allow a new, occasionally-useful thing for modders, while not changing anything else for neither mod authors nor mod users, so it'd essentially be an "entirely positive" change.
 
I'd love for someone to take P_ThrustIn2D and P_InstaThrustEvenIn2D out of the #if 0 define. It's already in the code.
I would like the availability of this in Lua scripting, among other places.

I would suggest the change in Github, although I do not know how Github's system works.
 
For the OpenGL renderer, having sprite rotation (e.g. characters in NiGHTS special stages) actually rotate the vertices of an un-rotated sprite, rather than "axis-alignedly" rendering a pre-rotated texture, would be nice.

That would allow more ("infinite") different rotation angles without cluttering the memory with multiple rotated copies of the textures or such, and simultaneously allow for "sub-pixel precision" on the sprite due to rotating the drawn element itself.

I understand that the textures themselves are rotated for the software renderer to ease the rendering, but why for the OpenGL one?


Similarly, though much less importantly (and unimportantly for vanilla SRB2), PNG textures shouldn't be converted into paletted things on the OpenGL renderer. I understand it for the software renderer, which only outputs the paletted colours anyway, but... That takes away truecolour support from the PNGs even in the truecolour-capable renderer (Edit: At least for level/object textures/sprites in WADs/PK3s; I think that 3D models' PNGs remain truecolour?). At that point, it'd maybe even be better to just entirely not support PNGs in the first place, to avoid giving false expectations about image quality.
 
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This might sound weird, but I think it would be kind of cool to bring back the 2.0 Brak Eggman fight, but as a Super Sonic fight, similar to that of Doomsday Zone in S3&K. Either that, or make it an emblem unlock-able.
 
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A little late, but I like the idea of Record Attack counting singleplayer playthroughs. Perhaps at the very least, the tokens could give 50 rings in Coop, where continues would be utterly useless?
Though, question, Mystic. If you implement this, how would it deal with Starposts?
 
It's a longer term goal, but the idea is that if it would be a valid record attack run, it'd count, meaning if you die it wouldn't record it.
 
Are there plans to make 3D models an option that comes with the game, like with SRB2 Kart? The new “orbital camera” option seems like a weird inclusion otherwise, since you can’t really see the 2D sprites clearly from above at all. It would also certainly help newcomers with platforming.
 
Suggestion 1: A setting to set a "maximum multiplier" for the GUI scale in resolutions above 320x200.
At 1920x1080, the default GUI scale multiplier is 5, which has a nice for standard GUI stuff like letters, but any graphics displayed at half size (such as life icons while in-game, or level emblems in menus) thusly have a multiplier of 2.5, causing the graphic to alternate between a pixel being 2 and 3 pixels wide/tall, which looks bad to me.
I would therefore like to cap the GUI scale multiplier at 4, so that half-size graphics don't alternate in pixel size, so that I can get a more "consistent" pixel size in the GUI.

It would be extra nice if this could be made to not affect the title screen (main menu, yes, but SRB2 logo, no), and also extra nice if graphics displayed with the V_PERPLAYER flag could get a separate setting (so that I could do a scale cap of 4 for single player, and 2 or 3 or such for split-screen if 4 is too big). But even without these things, a single game-wide GUI scale multiplier cap setting would be very appreciated by me.


Suggestion 2: An option to "un-squish" the HUD in split-screen mode. When playing with a friend, I'd rather take an occasional half-lack of mod support (as in v2.1) over the HUD being annoying to look at even without mods (as in v2.2).
If general HUD size is a problem, suggestion 1 might be beneficial for higher resolutions.


Suggestion 3: If title cards (e.g. "Green Flower Zone 1") are shown "globally" at the start of a level, not something that one player might see while another doesn't, removing the V_PERPLAYER flag from title card stuffs might also be nice, so that it displays nicely centered in the window rather than each split-screen player getting their own title card that always says the same thing as the other's.
 
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