Control feedback thread

So, the specific reason I didn't find it objectionable that Blaze's posts got addressed in this manner is because he has been proclaiming us to be immoral. The actual terms he used were "Second class citizens" and "Unconscionable". I'm not about to infract you for the above post because at this point you're responding to developer comments, and that's fair. Instigating a debate was the thing I was infracting you for there. The goal of the rule was to prevent the topic from devolving, but the things Blaze were saying absolutely needed to be addressed, and the topic, where both the subject matter is the same as what he's talking about and the data and information to demonstrate the problems with what he's saying are relevant to the understanding of what's going on in general is the best place to do it.

because you are planning to do more, in that you're planning to outright gut the option.
Gutting bad options is perfectly fine. I get the mentality of "Options are good for the players!", but it's flawed. For example, when I was here in the community and before being a dev, OpenGL was unsupported and had actual issues that could seriously impact play and in some cases outright cause the machine to crash. This didn't stop entire groups of people insisting on OpenGL being the "right" way to play SRB2 and telling other people to play it despite it actively making some people's lives more difficult. It would have been better to not provide the option in the first place since it wasn't functioning properly and had major issues and now we're still stuck with a thing we haven't been able to bring to parity.

This type of problem is exacerbated 1,000x with controls. It's not worth rehashing what we did to figure this out, but it is worth noting that's why we know it's a problem. The legacy option for analog isn't going to be just a legacy option. It's already being told to people that it's the "right" way to play with no consideration as to why it was shifted to console and obfuscated.

That said, the goal isn't to just gut analog before having a replacement. If we were going to do that, we would have just done it for 2.2 and be done with it. Discussion on how to improve controller support for the game has happened already in dev well before release, and extended controller support was already added. Clearly we have more to go, but it's not like we're throwing caution to the wind either.

But supporting analog in the long run is absolutely incorrect. We know it causes issues, and maintaining a broken system is effort code-wise that's ill spent. Analog will be going away when we find a better alternative, and that's the point of this topic.
 
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Immediately after making that post I hopped over to the Kart Krew Discord and grabbed fickle's latest .exe test for their own gamepad solution.

...if this gets patched in officially then yeah I won't be missing analog so much lmao, the amount of options on offer is a godsend (because you can pretty much make it handle like old analog but with more QOL stuff like a spindash aim cam if you so desire). I've switched over to it for now and beaten the game with it fairly cleanly just to make sure - and grabbed a few time trial emblems too.
 
Immediately after making that post I hopped over to the Kart Krew Discord and grabbed fickle's latest .exe test for their own gamepad solution.

...if this gets patched in officially then yeah I won't be missing analog so much lmao, the amount of options on offer is a godsend (because you can pretty much make it handle like old analog but with more QOL stuff like a spindash aim cam if you so desire). I've switched over to it for now and beaten the game with it fairly cleanly just to make sure - and grabbed a few time trial emblems too.
Just tried that .exe too and it's really good for controller. I like to turn all the sliders down on it so I have full control of my camera. I also agree temporary tank controls on charging the spindash would work well for controller.
 
So this is going to be a ramble and a half, apologies in advance.

I lost like 2 years of my life to the final demo release over a decade ago, because I was young and the internet was new to me and as a Sonic fan SRB2 was the coolest thing in the world. I primarily played on M+KB because I was poor and couldn't afford a usb controller. It was fun, I played a shit ton of it, but I don't think I ever 100% anything because I'm extremely bad at the game.

I got into Doom, which was a snap because my time playing SRB2 already accustomed me to messing around with .wads and such, and forgot all about SRB2 until 2.0 dropped, and even then I only played up to the Deep Sea Zone. I still used M+KB.

More time passes, Logan's MD2 pack reels me back in to 2.1 because seriously, that stuff looks incredible. I peter out at Deep Sea Zone Act 3 because 1: IMHO that boss fight was garbage and I'm glad it's gone, and 2: the MD2 pack only covers the first zone and a half, apparently. This time, I played with a controller. And it plays just fine because I'm able to enable Analog.
About 6 months pass and I get linked the 2.2 trailer, and it blows my mind. The sheer amount of polish on display sparks my imagination. It looks like how I remember SRB2 as a little kid: a real ass Sonic platformer, instead of the janky Doom mod that I recognize it as as a jaded adult.

I plug in my Dualshock 4 and.. it doesn't really work. I have to map camera and movement to the same stick to make it work for me, and I can't seem to make the right stick fully register at all, so truly modern controls are impossible. I read up on things, try the Analog console command, and eventually realize that it's a .ini flag now. I turn it on, and suddenly my boy Knuckles actually controls properly with a controller, I play through all the way to Arid Canyon just fine. Even the mine carts control properly and intuitively.

Eventually I find this thread, and I have to say, I am completely against removing Analog mode entirely. Maybe it's user error, but I couldn't get the right stick to control the camera, and I couldn't make any of the buttons mapped to camera reset actually do that, but if those issues were fixed, it'd play like a proper 3D platformer, IMHO. Occasionally I have to angle my character to angle the camera, but that's not that bad for someone who grew up with PS1/N64 era early 3D. The game is infinitely more fun and intuitive for me on a controller. Playing a Sonic game with a controller just feels right. I realize that there's a fancy new KB+M control scheme, and I could adapt to it just fine, but I'm doing perfectly well with my jank Analog mode. 'Better' controls wouldn't suddenly make me not bad at the game.


Either adjust and improve Analog mode if possible, but for the love of whatever you believe in, don't actually remove it. Keep it as an .ini flag if you must to keep new players from accidentally turning it on, but complete removal only shafts the people who enjoy and are accustomed to playing it with Analog Mode.

TL;DR: I've played with both over the course of a very long but sporadic time, I prefer Analog regardless of quality, please don't remove it entirely.
 
1. People want their character ability to aim in the direction that their character is facing instead of the camera, even if that means that they can thok in a direction that they can't see in.

Assuming this is implemented, I'd like for this to be toggleable by character. I like the default control scheme and I like always moving in a direction that I can see, but on multiple occasions I've landed next to a ring monitor as Amy, instinctively pressed left/right and the spin button, and then realized my mistake too late. Amy's hammer isn't movement-based so my brain treats it as something that should be relative to the character rather than the camera.
 
(insert post here)
I wish to take a moment to mention this specific post is the sort of information I think has largely gone unsure for many trying to read into the issue without being along with a lot of in depth details about development over the years. I completely understand that expecting to have a detailed and specific answer on this issue for each and every person who asks is absolutely unrealistic, however having a solid post like this quoted above I think is a great resource to have to easily refer back to and have users read to understand briefly the specifics of why analog mode is an issue from the development side of things right now. I think this is also where the issue is stemming for people beyond just the game itself since I know personally I don't follow every tiny little development and update or note which may be mentioned either somewhere in the forums, discord, GitHub, etc. And expecting casual players to read through multiple sources to try to find those specific answers becomes an issue as compared to maybe just having one go to post which can be linked or quoted with ease.

I do really appreciate the post Rob made because it helps with the specifics which have gone mostly unknown. Also thank you for this thread and discussion in general for allowing ideas to be presented to make a better replacement for analog moving forward than simply removing it altogether.
 
In the end, this is a Doom Engine game. It was designed with the intent that camera was full controllable and separately controlled from character movement. That's just how it goes. Being only able to thok/glide in the direction of the game is just like how in a shooter you shoot in the direction of the camera.

Even with a gamepad, I've found that in a game like this, having full camera control on the right stick is a good idea. I play Sonic Utopia and Spark The Electric Jester 2 for instance with that scheme.
 
Immediately after making that post I hopped over to the Kart Krew Discord and grabbed fickle's latest .exe test for their own gamepad solution
Just checked the exe out; they're incorporating a lot of ideas posted in this section, its a godsend really and a major step in the ideal direction.
I think it's a great point to start at with the ongoing discussion.
 
What if we could rotate the camera with LB and RB like in the PS1 Spyro games and had the player move independent of the camera in that mode? That would be pretty close to analog while giving the player more control over Sonic. It's not prefect but it's an improvement.
 
We did this because we found, in significant amounts of focus testing, that analog was actively harming people's fun when they found it. The new players that actually stuck with the weird hybrid control scheme performed better and had a better experience. What we apparently missed is that a lot of experienced players have been using analog for long enough that they actually got good at such a badly made scheme, and therefore the pushback is stronger than we expected.


The key thing I see here is "players that stuck with it." Couldn't all of this be chalked up to the natural learning curve of a game? That's where the fundamental breakdown seems to be occurring here -- people who learned it one way versus people who learned it another way.

It's not that people found the old analog controls confusing. The problem is that they are imprecise.

Sonic is an imprecise character. In general. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that. When you're moving quickly, you only have so much reaction time, even in the most ideal scenarios.

But I don't think the solution is to grab the player by the skull and force them with an iron grip to always stare at the back of Sonic's head no matter what. I mean, yeah, it works, but it's sort of like how population control works. It's a Thanos-quality solution.

I think it's more important to represent familiar, tried-and-true control standards and try to make the best of it from there. You can always design around the limitations. Heck, you almost don't even need to.

When you posted about finding the analog function again and were extolling its virtues, you posted a video of you going through GFZ and you were crashing into walls left and right and barely miss getting hit to crawlas due to pure luck. You also demonstrated quite an impressive mastery of the thok in that control scheme, nailing enemies at angles and doing other things that clearly demonstrate your high skill level at the scheme.

You say I've played a lot of SRB2, but in all honesty? This is the first time I'd touched SRB2's singleplayer beyond Green Flower or maybe Techno Hill in, like... well, gosh, at least since 2.1 came out, maybe even since 2.0 came out. As I noted on Twitter, my Steam shortcut for SRB2 was so old it not only pointed to a time before I rebuilt my system two years ago, it pointed to a HDD I haven't had in nearly five years, and who knows long that shortcut sat in my Steam install gathering dust back then.

And even then, my time of "playing a lot of SRB2," as in going for all the emblems, trying to collect all the Chaos Emeralds, making a serious attempt to full-clear the entire game with all the characters, that was 2004, 2005. Literally 15 years ago, on very, very, very different versions of these maps.

I remember when 2.0 released (2009?) and I wrote that review for TSSZ News, I got up to EggRock Zone, couldn't beat the last space walk section, and quit. I probably never looked back. And I think it was around that time that you and I talked about that area, and you first brought up the idea of doing it with WASD + Mouse. Even then, I was against it. That's probably why I never looked back.

It's obvious you've played this way for a long time, but you still didn't have the camera under control. This is because that the analog camera sucks. Hard.


I won't (and frankly can't) refute this, but at the same time, you do learn to live with it. You learn what it can and cannot do. SRB2 also used to have a button to reset the camera which helped a lot in tight spaces where the camera refused to deal with a wall.

But I think of it like this: Super Mario 64 doesn't have a great camera, either. But I still go back to Super Mario 64 and love Super Mario 64 and consider Super Mario 64 an impressive, influential landmark release, and though the camera is not great, it's workable.

Even though this is a new release of SRB2, it's still technically an old game. And not just an old game, but a very strange game. It's a weird Frankenstein monster where somehow a first-person shooter was twisted in to the shape of a 3D platformer. Analog Mode's camera is just the price you pay for that.

And for the talk of how much Analog Mode's camera sucks, on the new controls, with a controller, it's orders of magnitude worse. Sure, you get right stick camera control now, which is a benefit, but beyond that I don't think the camera is necessarily smarter, you've just forced the player in to a situation where they have to constantly babysit it more than ever.

In analog mode, I had the camera under control about as much as I do in any older 3D platformer that does not have overly-complex camera scripting, which is to say I acknowledge the fact that the camera kind of has a mind of its own -- thankfully, it's often very predictable, so it's not hard to anticipate what it's going to do and actually stay relatively hands-off. What you consider "out of control" I simply view as not needing to control. I coexist.

By the new standard, I can't do that anymore. I have to micromanage. It's built in to the system. If I play SRB2, I have to micromanage the camera. THAT, to me, is a truly bad camera system.

However, there appear to be two complaints here that analog mode pretends to solve:
1. People want their character ability to aim in the direction that their character is facing instead of the camera, even if that means that they can thok in a direction that they can't see in.
2. People want the camera to automatically face in the right direction instead of requiring it to be managed.

I think it's very important to distinguish these complaints from the KB+M/controller complaints, because these are tangible, real issues that we can try to address.

You can try to distinguish the complaints if you want, but there's no denying that the two feel pretty intrinsically linked. The new controls were built with KBAM as the ideal way to play. The tutorial tells you everything in keyboard keys, even if you have a controller connected and are using controller buttons to advance the dialog. Just constantly, keyboard, keyboard, use the mouse, use the mouse.

You try to lay it on me that I've spent a very long time with my control setup, but given you've probably played a thousand times more SRB2 than I have in the last ten years, how is your natural familiarity with SRB2's maps and control mechanics tinting how you played through the game with a SNES controller? Have you considered the fact that you didn't play through the game with an analog stick to be a contributing factor as to why this is now an issue?

Because of the outcry there are currently several people on and off the team experimenting with this to try to create an automatic camera that isn't utter rubbish, but that'll almost certainly take a bit to experiment with and find out what works best.

I hope so. I know I made a lot of noise and kicked up a lot of dirt and not all of it was even warranted because I kind of let myself go off on a weird tangent without actually stopping to think enough and just talk to you people directly.

But I do that because I still genuinely love SRB2. When the trailer dropped for 2.2 a week and a half ago, I was so excited and so proud to see how far the game had come. Everyone did such good work to elevate the game to the next level in terms of presentation and polish...

And then to boot it up for myself and to get hit with the new controls was like being stabbed in the gut. The one thing I've been consistent about, whether it's at SAGE or wherever, is the idea of controls being a game's foundation and how nothing else matters if you cannot control a game. And these controls, with their keyboard keyboard, mouse mouse, micromanage the camera, it left me feeling very wounded. All of that excitement and energy I was feeling for 2.2 had to find an outlet somewhere, and it hasn't always been a smart or kind one.

This isn't a good thread for this, but to anyone on the development team I've upset over my ignorance, I offer my deepest condolences. I was too online.
 
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The key thing I see here is "players that stuck with it." Couldn't all of this be chalked up to the natural learning curve of a game? That's where the fundamental breakdown seems to be occurring here -- people who learned it one way versus people who learned it another way.

(...)

And for the talk of how much Analog Mode's camera sucks, on the new controls, with a controller, it's orders of magnitude worse.

(...)

By the new standard, I can't do that anymore. I have to micromanage. It's built in to the system. If I play SRB2, I have to micromanage the camera. THAT, to me, is a truly bad camera system.

These things are more related than I think you realize. Before getting into the first point, it's really important to touch on the second and third one, because there's a misconception here.

SRB2's default controls always, for all releases, assumed you were managing the camera. This is not something new to 2.2. if you were to go back and re-install 2.0 or final demo, you'll find "turn left" and "turn right" are defaulted to left and right keys. These are the exact same things as we have right now with the camera controls "look left" and "look right". We just changed where they show up in the options menu, and swapped the strafe keys to be move left and move right by default instead. But these are the same strafe functions from Final Demo era

And this standard isn't new. I specifically remember during the 2.0 development cycle (so while 1.09.4 was the current version) getting a copy of Egg Rock 1. This was early enough in development that Egg Rock 2 wasn't even a thing yet. It was tested pretty exclusively in netgames. One particular trouble area came about at the crusher room for Sonic above the Knuckles route. People, myself included, were regularly dying there. AJ, correctly, pointed out that we weren't doing well because we were using the strafe keys, and to try the turn keys instead. That immediately solved the problem and made the room significantly easier. Those same turn keys are the ones we now label as being camera commands. This means that we have, for a long time now, been assuming camera controls are something the player will be using to some degree.

Now in regards to fucus testing, before getting into the actual findings, it's important to note that we were doing new player testing at lots of stages in the game. We suspected analog was an issue but didn't remove it until we had actual evidence to suggest what was going on. Analog was suspecteed to be an issue before doing what we did for 2.2, and is (in part and not in whole) why we killed SA mode. SA mode forced you to use analog as a base and there were a lot of complaints about SA mode when we'd see a new level with it turned on. I really would like to avoid talking about SA mode as a whole here because it's not really relevant, it's just worth noting that this definitely made analog mode be more critically looked at by a lot of people.

For myself, before we nixed anything, I would watch people play and largely not comment and let them find out on their own what was going on. What I saw here actually diverges into two different issues, one of those being something that autobrake resolved, but that's less important to the discussion of analog. What I saw was actually people finding analog and thinking it was SA style controls. And they would use it, and have a hard time doing lots of things and wonder why things weren't working. Switching back to base would resolve a lot of the issues they had pretty quickly. This was a consistent problem that would happen regardless of what type of controller or keyboard they would use. Trying the camera controls would do them a lot of favors in general. This was well before the tutorial, this was before killing analog from the options. This was all in the early stages of "what are new players experiencing and what can we do to improve" questioning and investigation.

Sonic is an imprecise character. In general. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that. When you're moving quickly, you only have so much reaction time, even in the most ideal scenarios.

I am a Sonic player primarily, and I am not sure I agree with this. I am very typically able to navigate the character to get him to move in precise lines and curves. I get that you could argue that I've been playing for a while now, but I can go back to 1.09 era on youtube and find videos of people doing all sorts of crazy precise things with him there, from people who haven't been playing for 15 years. And I'm not convinced that we need a control mode that sacrifices accuracy for minimal benefit. Something you may or may not have caught in other responses in this thread where people are trying out a new setup that doesn't have this problem but does tackle some of what people seem to like about analog, and doesn't seem to have the pitfalls of analog. So I can't say agree that the premise or conclusion regarding analog here is valid.

Even though this is a new release of SRB2, it's still technically an old game. And not just an old game, but a very strange game. It's a weird Frankenstein monster where somehow a first-person shooter was twisted in to the shape of a 3D platformer. Analog Mode's camera is just the price you pay for that.

See, I think it's important to really own the fact that we are a weird amalgamation of FPS and platformer. This is where I move very much away from data driven opinions and into my personal understanding of the game, so this is way more subjective, but I think that we shouldn't be looking at "How do we implement platform controls" so much as we should be looking at "How do we bridge the gap between FPS and platformer." The base controls for 3rd person are still very much FPS. You could even reasonably imagine Sonic as the bullet you fire when you thok and the control scheme immediately makes sense. And we've actually been credited for the base control scheme a lot, but it's usually after people play it for a while. But your points on the game being a platformer too aren't invalid, especially when people grab a controller specifically for that experience. I just don't think the right answer here is to jump straight to a complete platforming control setup when, routinely, we have been credited for eschewing the standards of modern 3D Sonic platforming (and platforming games in general) in favor of a more momentum and physics-oriented game. Is it industry standard? No, and we're aware of that. Should we be? I don't think so, things have generally been working for us and there are improvements we can make, I'm sure, but I don't think we should necessarily be bound to what the industry is doing when our own goal is to do something the industry isn't from the outset. Are there specific things the industry does we can incorporate seemlessly with strict upside? Absolutely, I'm sure there are. I'm not about to profess that we have everything right and that there aren't improvements or changes that can be made, and we're very open to feedback and opinions. I just am confident that analog mode, specifically, is not a good choice here.

The new controls were built with KBAM as the ideal way to play. The tutorial tells you everything in keyboard keys, even if you have a controller connected and are using controller buttons to advance the dialog. Just constantly, keyboard, keyboard, use the mouse, use the mouse.
So I actually find this to be a very valid criticism in response to the tutorial insofar as gamepad goes. I think the issue we would have in implementing it in the immediate right now is we'd have to figure out what an ideal control scheme should look like, and with the question of "what specifically are we doing with the proposed control update" needs to be answered before we can tackle it properly. Plus we need to draw resources for that in order to go anywhere, so while ideally we would like it in the next patch update, it may be a bit before we actually get it done.


Not trying to downplay your apology by not including it, but it's a lot of text to quote when I just want to acknowledge that I'm switching gears.

It's very appreciated. I totally understand where you are coming from and honestly I would probably have been very agitated too. Not advertising the change well may have been a mistake. We did it largely because we wanted people to give the base controls with directionchar a fair shake, but that wasn't the best idea in hindsight.

I want to be clear that nothing you said was wrong in the abstract, but we did feel that none of it really applied to us. It didn't feel like you were saying anything deliberately inflammatory or malicious. To be told that we're neglecting to consider other opinions and generally being inconsiderate when we went out of our way to did bother us and that's where it kind of hurt.

other Egg Rock things

And, while this is a little bit off topic, your criticisms of Egg Rock aren't necessarily invalid at the outset, but you should be aware that there's an existing Egg Rock remake that just wasn't gonna be ready for 2.2, so we stuck with the old one since it's really not bad. It's just no longer great by the standards we set in 2.2.
 
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Sonic is an imprecise character. In general. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that. When you're moving quickly, you only have so much reaction time, even in the most ideal scenarios.

That's not true. In fact, out of all the characters, Sonic might be the most precise. The reason for this being that Sonic is able to direct all of his horizontal momentum in a single thrust. He has full control over where he's going on the ground, more so than any other character. But it's because of expert use of the thok and camera that the player is able to achieve this.

The issue is that not all control methods are as precise as keyboard and mouse. This is the same issue that comes up in any shooter; if a gamepad user doesn't have aim assist, then all of his firing is wildly inaccurate. Sonic's thok turns him into a speeding bullet, but that means that the player needs to be able to control the thok with finess in order to get the full usage out of it. Analog is great for easily allowing Sonic to thok in different directions, but once you try to snipe enemies or land on platforms at long distance, analog starts running into problems. Intuitiveness of direction-char notwithstanding, the "standard" control scheme's biggest problem on gamepad is that it allows for more accurate thokking, but it doesn't allow for freedom of movement.



What gamepad really needs is a control scheme allows for the freedom of movement provided by analog, while still giving players more precise control over their movement and camera to not get screwed when moving at high speeds. The issue of analog, besides its auto camera being sloppy, is that it doesn't offer any additional tools to the player to allow for greater precision. There's a rework of the control scheme taking place that should address most of those issues.
 
Copypasting this from the discussion topic on the Sonic Retro forum, since I felt it needed to be said here too:


I will admit, I was one of the people who had gotten angry about the removal of Analog Mode from the menus, but once I sat down and actually played through the game with the standard controls (albeit partially unwillingly and having to start over because I had used a mod with a save that corrupted when I tried to make it vanilla), I got used to the default controls and can see why the devs want us to give it a shot. And I figured relegating it to a console command would be a good thing to deter players who couldn't handle it.

At the same time, I feel like I'm responsible for starting this whole drama, as I was one of the first to complain, and I apologize for that.


Most of it's basically stuff I've already said on here, but a big thing I wanted to share was the last line, as I feel a bit guilty for being one of the first to complain about analog mode and thus possibly starting this whole mess.
 
Most of it's basically stuff I've already said on here, but a big thing I wanted to share was the last line, as I feel a bit guilty for being one of the first to complain about analog mode and thus possibly starting this whole mess.

Nah, this was a shitshow waiting to happen. If you hadn't brought it up, someone else would have.
 
To me the 3 must-haves for controller options are

1. A button that snaps the camera behind where the player is facing. (Like the bumpers in Mario Odyssey)

2. Characters with abilities that launch them forward should at least have an option to have the way they're facing be the direction the move launches them.

(Side note: for Knuckles I feel like how ridiculously fast and easy it is for knuckles to change directions while gliding in the old analog mode might be unintentional and possibly one of the reasons the control scheme had to go, so for Knux even just the ability to turn him while gliding without using the right stick would be very much appreciated)

3. at least an option for the camera to attempt to move with the player to keep the forced camera micromanaging to a minimum.

Also, 1 more quick side note. If there could be some kind of Zoom toggle button to tweak the camera distance would also be majorly appreciated since it could help keep the camera form catching on objects in some situations and would compliment the new orbital look option.

honestly though, points 2 and 3 here are the main reason I preferred analog so as long as those end up options I'd be satisfied.
 
I've yet to fully collect my thoughts on how I feel about controllers yet, my experience with it was after I had my fill of keyboard-only and MouseWADS. I wanted something easier to get comfortable with in my chair. Instead, have a video of a fresh player playing through the entire game with the (mostly) default Gamepad controls. He mentions shortly after the start that he's using an Xbox 360 controller.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4-EBI5H4Mw&
 
So, I always use a controller. My controller layout is left stick to move, bottom face button to jump, left face button to spin, and the bumpers for camera movement.

I need to be able to control the camera at all times, even when I'm jumping, so I rarely use the right stick at all. By putting camera movement on the bumpers, I can use my pointer fingers to move the camera while my thumb continues to use the face buttons.

I have heard the suggestion of putting jump and spin on the triggers to free your thumb to use the right stick at all times, but that is absolute nonsense. In every other damn platformer like... ever, you use the face buttons to jump. Besides, the bumpers do a good enough job moving the camera. It never needs to be super precise.

I used analog controls back in 2.1, because I did not like sonic just kind of awkwardly turning instead of just directly going where I was pointing the stick. I will say, it wasn't quite as bad as people made it out to be. It was at least playable.

When transitioning to 2.2, I wanted to continue to use analog controls. When I tried to ask in the discord what the command was however, the staff were just kinda like "nah". So, I was forced to use the normal controls for a while.

Fairly quickly, I got mostly used to it. I was running and jumping around the levels just as good, if not better than I used to. But, one thing that would not stop bothering me is the disability to thok in different angles. I just could not fully get used to that.

As I was reading this thread, I finally actually found the command to turn on analog mode. After having used the normal controls for 7 playthroughs (so don't you fucking tell me I didn't give them a fair shot), I wanted to still give the analog controls another try, just to see how it was from my new perspective.

So, I did an entire other playthrough as sonic, with the analog controls turned on. I played almost the entire game using only the analog controls. While still not necessarily bad... they're still worse.

Here's the thing about the normal 2.2 controls, right? They still have a full 360 degree character movement when using a stick, instead of just kind of awkwardly turning, and it is smooth as butter. The directionchar feature also really helps with the game feel.

There are two main problems I had with analog as I tried to play with it again:

1. It felt more slippery, weirdly enough. It felt like I was sliding around the place a lot more as I tried to use it.

2. The camera. Holy shit. Sensitivity isn't the problem, the problem is that it is constantly fighting you for control of the camera, which sometimes makes the camera too fast, or other times makes it painfully slow. While manageable in the levels, trying to do the metal sonic fight with that camera was awful. I had to switch to normal controls and it immediately felt so much better.

So, honestly... for the most part, the normal default controls are better in every way than analog, even on a controller. I admit that. But, I don't think I'll ever get used to the game never allowing me to thok at different angles. That will never stop tripping me up. I'm perfectly capable of holding forward or even letting go of the stick if I needed to thok forward, why do I have to be forced in one direction like this?
 
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I'm not a fan of analog control and still prefer the default controls over fickle's, but fickle's mod is absolutely much better than analog ever was. If you still swear by analog, please give that mod a try.
 
I have given it some thought, and I might have thought of a compromise.

First of all, the option to thok in any direction as some have suggested would probably satisfy a lot of people who played analog mode solely for that feature. Second of all, for those who still insist on having analog back, perhaps you could set it as an unlockable for clearing the campaign as Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles to ensure that they have given the default controls a fair shake for all three main characters. Third of all, keep whatever the console command is to enable it so that those who insist on using it still have the option even before they unlock it. This feature would only even be known to experienced players anyway, unless they told their friends who were just trying out the game for the first time.

This way, new players aren't turned off from the game by immediately trying analog mode and suffering it's problems as a result, and experienced players who swear by it no longer have anything to complain about. Everyone else who prefers the default controls (myself included) can then (hopefully) go on with their lives pretending the controversy never happened.
 

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