Hello everybody! To cap off the summer, we’re bringing you part 1 of a double whammy of releases! Today’s release is SRB2 v2.2.12. Let’s start with the major highlights of the patch:

The first change I’d like to talk about has been requested by probably hundreds if not thousands of players by now, going back farther than when I myself started playing SRB2: you can now save the game and unlock secrets when addons are loaded. For as long as I can remember, SRB2 locked you out of saving with addons loaded as a defense against cheating — in the old days, the question our team asked was “Why should you be allowed to keep all 7 Chaos Emeralds if you only got them by replacing GFZ1 with a little room with the emeralds in it?” Well, times and changed, and the question we now ask is “Why not?” We believe that SRB2 is a game that people should be able to play any way they want. Besides, modders have long since figured out that all you had to do to save with addons was to load a SOC that allowed you to make custom saves, so all the limitation served to accomplish was to be an inconvenience to players who just wanted to 100% the game as Shadow. So go out there, add your favorite characters and scripts, and enjoy playing SRB2 the way YOU want! (To be clear, stuff like DEVMODE is still considered cheating and will still stop you from saving, so don’t go thinkin’ there’s no more cheat protections at all!)

The other major change I’d like to talk about is multiplayer emblems. You can now team up with your friends locally or online to collect emblems in the base game campaign or any map pack. For most map packs, the emblems you collect in netgames are yours alone; they are not shared with other players. They’ll have to hunt ’em down themselves! However, map pack creators can choose to make them shared by setting SHAREEMBLEMS = true in their MAINCFG SOC. Just remember, in netgames, the content that’s unlocked and accessible is determined by whatever the host player has unlocked. A minor exception to this is dedicated servers, wherein all content is automatically unlocked. Additionally, you can now unlock record attack emblems in regular single-player gameplay and in netgames. We hope you’ll have a great time earning and tracking down emblems with these changes.

Also worth noting are these changes:

• Fixed inconsistent crash caused by music volume fading while changing to different music
• 44 new player colors (press enter on the selector to see ’em all in a nice grid)
• Toggle fullscreen on/off with F11, toggle renderers with F10
• More accurate FPS counter
• Cutscenes now play at correct speed for netgame clients
• Fixed joining netgames during intermission causing strange behavior
• Fixed IPv6 support
• New UDMF, SOC, and Lua features

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of changes, so check out the full changelog to see the rest. Fixes for the long-standing issues commonly known as “leavebug” and “chatbug” are not on it — we’re still looking for a reliable way to reproduce those, so if you know of one, please get on our Discord server or our GitHub or GitLab and tell us about it. Additionally, changing from OpenGL to software render modes may not work in fullscreen; try going back to windowed mode with F11 first.

Please also note that the changes in the UDMF implementation have resulted in maps using object scaling to only scale their sprites, not their properties. You’ll want to extract your map’s TEXTMAP lump using SLADE, then run this Python script we wrote on it. Just make sure TEXTMAP is in the same folder as the script, and when the script is finished, you’ll get a TEXTMAP_MODIFIED.txt. Replacing the TEXTMAP in your map with the modified one will restore the objects to the way they behaved in the previous patch.

Those of you deeply ingrained in our community are probably aware by now that one of our artists, MotorRoach, has completed a set of improved sprites for each character in SRB2. We know many of you were looking forward to seeing this in v2.2.12, but we have chosen to hold off on putting them in the game for now. While 4 of the 6 characters’ sprites are ready to put in the game right now, the last two, Fang and Amy, require code to account for additional animation frames created as part of the improvement process. This code was not worked on in time for the feature freeze phase of this patch cycle. Although we could have put the new sprites in for four of the characters, we ultimately decided that it was more important to keep the scope of this patch under control, and to keep the style of all the characters’ sprites consistent. While we can’t promise when we’ll be implementing them, rest assured we know how excited you are to play with them — trust me, we’re excited to play with them too! — and we’re underway working on the necessary code to get them in the game proper.

For those of you not in the know, click here to see a sneak peek at the improved sprites!

That wraps up our news for today. Don’t forget to grab the new patch on our Download page. Keep an eye here on SRB2.org and on our social media accounts so you don’t miss the thrilling conclusion of our double whammy. Thanks for being such an incredible community, and as always, thanks for playing!