Combine Ring Monitor and Hyper Ring Monitor

The Combine Ring Monitor is a unique powerup introduced in Knuckles' Chaotix. When destroyed, it allows the player take one hit in which he/she would drop one large ring instead of multiple individual rings. This large ring would give the player back all of the rings he/she obtained prior to taking the hit. If not collected within a few seconds, it would burst and spill those rings instead.

With this mod, I have done my best to replicate this mechanic in SRB2!





When you add this wad, some Super Ring Monitors will become Combine Ring Monitors, and some will become their variant from Mania, Hyper Ring Monitors! See below for detailed mechanics on each:

Combine Ring Monitor:

Spoiler:

Destroy the monitor with a blue ring icon to obtain the Combine Ring powerup, indicated by the small blue icon on your HUD. If you get hurt while holding this powerup, you will drop one large ring, instead of individual rings.



Pick up this ring to get all your rings back. If you don't pick it up within a small amount of time, the ring will burst and spill your rings instead.



Keep in mind, any player can pick up a spilled Combine Ring and steal all of your rings. Gotta go fast!

Hyper Ring Monitor:

Spoiler:

Destroy the monitor with a cyan ring icon to obtain the Hyper Ring powerup, indicated by the small cyan icon on your HUD. If you get hurt while holding this powerup, you will drop several meduim-sized rings, instead of individual rings.



Pick up these rings to gain a portion of your total ring count back. Unlike the Combine Rings, these won't burst, so pick them up while they last!

There are a few console commands included with this mod:

combineboxchance

Use this command to change the frequency of Super Ring Monitors that spawn as Combine Ring Monitors. By default, this is 20, which means that each Super Ring Monitor has a 20% chance of spawning as a Combine Ring Monitor. You can pick any value from 0 - 100 (0 disables the Combine Ring Monitors from spawning entirely, while 100 makes every Super Ring Monitor a Combine Ring Monitor, except where it become a Hyper Ring Monitor instead).

hyperboxchance

Use this command to change the frequency of Super Ring Monitors that spawn as Hyper Ring Monitors. By default, this is 20, which means that each Super Ring Monitor has a 20% chance of spawning as a Hyper Ring Monitor. You can pick any value from 0 - 100 (0 disables the Hyper Ring Monitors from spawning entirely, while 100 makes every Super Ring Monitor a Hyper Ring Monitor, except where it become a Combine Ring Monitor instead).

combineweaponrings

Use this command to toggle whether weapon rings are stored in Combine Rings. Yes, this means you can pick up all of your weapons and match rings if you get hurt! But be careful, as other players can take them from you too. By default, this is set to true (because I didn't program that shizzle for nothing). This command only applies to Combine Rings; Hyper Rings do not store weapon rings.

Enjoy!

Changelog:

Spoiler:

v2.0
• Hyper Ring added
• Graphics updated to look nicer overall
• HUD icons updated to work similarly to that of Sonic Mania—no more interfering with the rightside HUD!
• Added splitscreen support
• Fixed a bug where holding a Combine Ring and getting hurt with 0 rings allowed the player to stay alive indefinitely (players are now killed as normal)

v1.0
• Initial release

--

As you can see below, there are two versions of this wad. The first is the mod as it is intended for use in regular gameplay (combinering.zip). If you want to play regular SRB2 with all the features I outlined above (which will be most of you), download this file. The second file (combinering-item.zip) contains a version of the wad that map makers can use to implement the Combine Ring Monitor and/or Hyper Ring Monitor in their map, if they wish. It removes the Super Ring Monitor replacement functionality. If you wish to use the Combine Ring Monitor or Hyper Ring Monitor, please read the instructions included at the top of the Lua script lump, and don't forget to give credit!

[TehRealSalt]

Welcome to releases~!!

[MK.exe]

Oh neat this will be helpful. Nice work

[ManimiFire]

Nice job on making this Lach!

[GreenKnight9000]

This is amazing! Definitely makes the game more easier

[Bryce Hego]

What if in match after losing rings 3 times you spit out the combined ring for your opponent to get making it easier to steal their rings and kill them.

[Superjustinbros]

I welcome this mod with open arms- extra props for multiplayer functionality.

If I had to make any suggestions, maybe the sides of the monitor's screen could be colored to match the ring itself, while losing the ring itself plays the standard ring loss jingle instead of shield loss/death. Either way an excellent effort.

[MarioFreak2001]

This is really cool!
But I think what would've been cool would be the option to use Mania's version of the combine ring, but this is still cool.

(BTW Mania's version has a few giant rings spill from you when you get hit instead of just 1)

[Lach]

Originally Posted by MarioFreak2001

This is really cool!
But I think what would've been cool would be the option to use Mania's version of the combine ring, but this is still cool.

(BTW Mania's version has a few giant rings spill from you when you get hit instead of just 1)

I was inspired to do this because Mania included the combine ring, but I don't know how the game calculates how many large rings are spawned or how many rings are contained within those large rings, so I had to do it Chaotix style.

Perhaps in the future I will update it to allow that option.

[Lach]

G'day everyone! I just updated this mod; it now includes the Hyper Ring variant from Sonic Mania, plus lots of cool graphics changes and small bugfixes! I've been seeing some people make maps using this mod so if that person is you, please update so you can be hip and popular!

[Aquatic Akito]

so if your telling me this, if I set my rings to 9999 and make a combine ring... it will rain rings when exploded?

[Lach]

Originally Posted by SMSGARDIAN

so if your telling me this, if I set my rings to 9999 and make a combine ring... it will rain rings when exploded?

Yes, though I do believe I capped the number of rings that could explode from a combine ring to be 200 because some people had complaints about the lag it caused beyond that number.

[Lach]

Hi! I've just uploaded another update for this script. There's a lot of code in the WAD that I can write in a much better way now, but I'm not going to perform any cleanup until 2.2. The purpose of this update is just to make the mod much easier and safer to use in case mappers want to use these monitors in KAWAIII.

• Combine or Hyper rings collected by a bot player (e.g. when playing as Sonic and Tails) now count towards the lead player's ring count.
• The method I used to use to allow map makers to set the Thing numbers for the monitors broke when multiple scripts were added. I've done two things to rectify that:
  1. The Combine Ring Monitor has a Thing type of 3034 and the Hyper Ring Monitor a Thing type of 3035. These numbers were suggested to me by mapper Lilac.
  2. The Lua script can now only load once, so any other WAD containing the script will no longer interfere with every other instance of the script.

[Lach]

Oops! I accidentally made gave the Combine Ring icon object the the Hyper Ring Monitor's Thing type, which meant it wasn't possible to spawn a Hyper Ring Monitor through a map editor. Sorry! I've uploaded new versions of the files to fix this.