Good to see you all with us in 2026! We hope your holidays have been fantastic, and that these first weeks of the year have been treating you well.

First off, we’d like to not only thank you guys for sticking around with SRB2 and supporting our project, but also to apologize for a number of incidents that started before the release of v2.2.14. They originated from a combination of issues, many of which were a lack of internal organization, proper QA and rigor in sourcing assets and works from other parties.

If you’ve been around for that, you sure will remember a release of the game being rendered unplayable due to mismatched SOC definitions (the Ugly Knux incident), the scramble for adding then removing a feature that was implemented too early (the shield button), and most notably, maps containing assets that we had no proper clearance for (Pipe Towers Zone, among others). We were just a bit short of effort and care from not having to take that content back from you, as well as not disappointing those creators who put so much of that into theirs – as a result, we’re setting higher standards for ourselves going forward.

While our team’s top priority has shifted to getting v2.3 finished, some of you might remember from our v2.2.14 update post that we had more content planned for the v2.2.x patch cycle. After some consideration, we’ve decided that most of the planned content updates need further polish and will go into v2.3 instead; in exchange, we’re preparing something fresh and developed in-house to round out the v2.2 experience.

As a replacement to Final Demo Zone, v2.2.16 will feature an entirely original Single Player level. We’d say it’s new, but it’s a level that has actually existed since the Final Demo days of SRB2, though its unlock conditions were so stringent that there’s probably nobody left in the community who’s truly experienced it. It should be much easier to access now, so give it a try!

Final Demo Zone will remain playable as an add-on you can download here. That said, we’d like to talk more about what we’re doing for the next major version of SRB2, v2.3.

As you may already know, v2.3 is not meant to be a big overhaul compared to what v2.2 was to its previous version, and is focused on polishing and finishing what it couldn’t. This mostly means acts 2 and 3 of Red Volcano Zone, as well as a full remake of Egg Rock Zone.

What we have for RVZ1 is already quite solid and is planned to only receive small layout changes, on top of a lush new skybox. RVZ2 is still under construction so it’s not as screenshottable yet, but this should give you a good idea of what to expect in terms of eye candy.

Since ERZ is the one receiving the bulk of the changes, we can afford to go into a little more detail in our vision for this remake. Act 1’s rehaul will stay closely aligned with the original layout, but will move away from an assorted gimmick gauntlet towards expanding on the zone’s core mechanics. You can expect familiar rooms to return in original, engaging forms that make full use of v2.2’s features.

Act 2 is being truly remade from the ground up, reimagining the final challenge while respecting the level’s legacy. Some of the most iconic sections and mechanics will be brought back into yet unseen layouts that emphasize visual spectacle and even tougher platforming. This is the final trial of the campaign, after all, so it won’t hold your hand.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the rest of the game will remain the same. Other levels of the campaign may still receive updates, some small, some big, though not as extensive as the ones above, together with planned content that didn’t make it into v2.2. Besides, we are still working on the heavily debated physics adjustments, as well as further refinements for abilities to account for those changes, not to mention all the sweet new features and fixes from our community Git contributors. A lot to look forward to!

We know how much SRB2 means to our players and community members, and it means no less to us, so it’s a responsibility we intend to share throughout this year, and the years to come until the project is complete. Happy 2026, and we hope you continue to enjoy the game as much as we enjoy making it!

TL;DR: belated happy new year to you! We’re still alive and kicking – we made a couple development blunders and would like to apologize, though we can’t shorten that apology, so read the whole thing if you want details. To make amends, we’re still working hard on v2.2.16, and have new updates about v2.3 to share (see screenshots). Thanks for sticking with us!

please check out https://afd2025.srb2.org/

This is mainly a hotfix to address all of the issues that came with 2.2.14, so there’s not much to write home about, except that now you can play the game as intended again.

Besides the fix to the list of constants that caused a portion of large scale mods to crash on load, we have decided to revert the dedicated shield button addition. After further consideration and community feedback, we have decided that this change is not worth breaking mod compatibility for just yet, so we’ll save it for the next major version of the game.

Additionally, we have chosen to revert Pipe Towers Zone to its previous version in order to resolve some asset crediting issues that sprang up after launch – for this and other reasons, 2.2.14 will no longer be available for download. We’ll keep you guys posted while we look into the best way to make this version of the map playable again for everyone.

You can find this update on the Downloads page, and the full changelog at our GitLab.

Big thanks to everyone for the patience and understanding while our developers worked overtime to address these issues and then some. Enjoy, and see you next patch!

Oh, wow. It’s been a while since our last newspost. Almost one year, precisely. Anyway.

Patch v2.2.14 is finally out, and we have a very good reason for why it took us this long. Besides the usual batch of bugfixes and optimizations, this patch brings to you a major overhaul of the Match and CTF rotations.

This is the first part of our two-patch content update plan to wrap up v2.2 with a neat little bow. As the next major version of SRB2 is very likely not going to include ringslinger game modes by default, our mappers have worked hard to give these maps the love they deserve so we can send ringslinger off with a bang.

There have been revamps across many existing Match and CTF maps and you’re also going to find brand new ones by our community creators, like Crystalline Heights Zone and Pristine Shores Zone by Revan, as well as Summit Showdown Zone by Evertone, so knock yourself (and others) out.

If you’re not big on ringslinger, you also get to eat – a few of our unlockable stages have also received updates. Shoutout to our community creator Skydusk, whose reimagined Pipe Towers Zone is the ultimate version of our homage to the plumber, remade from the ground up and sporting shiny new assets. Definitely give it a try!

We’ve also chosen to replace Techno Legacy Zone with something that better represents the game’s own legacy. By our former developer toaster, enter Final Demo Zone: a delightful mashup of all the levels in the Single Player campaign of SRB2’s Final Demo (1.09.4, for the nostalgic) in one bite-sized experience. No better thing to tide you over as you wait for the final version of the game to come out.

There are a couple more Single Player changes lined up for the second part of this final update to v2.2, but for the time being, Aerial Garden Zone enthusiasts will also notice more pleasant visuals due to the improved texture work.

And the thing everyone’s been waiting for: all character sprites have received a fresh coat of paint by megatalented spriter and former developer MotorRoach. He’s been a long-standing member of Sonic Team Junior and we’re going our separate ways for now, but as soon as you take a look at the new spritework, you’ll agree with us that we’re not gonna need any new ones for a very long time, and whenever we do, it’s not gonna be an easy task to match his craft. Thanks for all the hard work, Roach!

As for the quality of life and modding features for this patch, you’ll see there’s more stuff that justifies the wait. Such as:

• The game now has a dedicated Shield button.
• The OpenGL renderer now supports Software-esque palette rendering.
• Mappers now have access to texture scaling, per-wall lighting, and sector portals.
• Scripters can now take advantage of longer sprite names, ZDoom-like color translations, a bunch of new Lua functionality, and a raise in the skins cap.

As usual, you can head over to the Downloads page to get this update, and the full changelog can be found at our GitLab.

A big thanks to everyone that contributed in the testing process for this patch, a Happy New Year, and see you next time!

Hello everybody! OLDC staff and the collab participants have been working on the next exciting round of the OLDC for quite a while now, and we’re pleased to finally share what we’ve cooked up. (I’m a bit late to publish this, but between issues preventing me from getting this news post up at all and some severe bugs with the initial release, I opted to wait.) We decided to have a little extra fun this time around, allowing participants to create little stores in a mall, which functions as this round’s hub. As with last round, participants were also encouraged to allow fellow participants to enhance their map submissions.

Round 2 here contains a total of 34 maps to play (not far from the current record of 41), ranging from plains to farms to glaciers to asteroids and much, much more. Mappers like Othius and Vixuzen have returned to the event once more, and newcomers like starshy and SonicHeroX45 have brought some variety to the table as well.

There are once again several new features this time around, the most important of which being the mall minimap, which can be enabled or disabled with a console command. The mall really is massive, but the minimap should help you find your way around.

If you’d like to play the latest iteration of the OLDC, make sure you’re running SRB2 v2.2.13 or later, then click here to grab it! Quite a few entries have already been submitted for the next OLDC, but if you haven’t gotten yours in yet, make sure you do so before May 1st, 2024, at 11:59pm UTC (6:59pm EST).

As always, thanks for your continued support of SRB2, and thanks for playing! Speaking of playing, quit reading this post like a big nerd and go play the new OLDC pack already!

Hello everybody! Here’s the conclusion of our double triple whammy!

The latest round of the OLDC has just released. As most of you are aware by now, the OLDC is no longer a contest, it’s a collaboration instead. The changes in the previous event were big, but we want to go all in on collaboration. This time, we decided to do something new: once the participants had a while to polish their maps, we asked them all to collaborate in order to further enhance each other’s maps. With this change, the OLDC is no longer simply a pack of levels submitted by a bunch of people, it’s a truly collaborative event!

And what an event this has been! Our participants have got a whopping 29 maps for you all to play — including the most Single Player maps ever in an OLDC to date — and some of them are just incredible. Mappers like Othius, RoyKirbs, and TheLastKitchenGun have taken full advantage of the capabilities of UDMF to create visually stunning playgrounds for Sonic and the gang to roam. Programmers like Tatsuru, BuggieTheBug, and Princess Plushima have also provided some incredible Lua work which is used to provide gameplay experiences never seen in SRB2 before.

There are several cool new features this time around, but the feature I want to make sure people are aware of is the special new portals that only appear while in a multiplayer game. We thought they would make it more convenient to access the handful of ringslinger and circuit maps included. They might make for a nice break between co-op levels.

If you’re interested in playing the latest edition of the OLDC, make sure you update SRB2 to v2.2.13, then click here to check it out! We’re looking forward to the next round of OLDC submissions, which are due November 1st, 2023, at 11:59pm UTC (6:59pm EST). We’ve already gotten a couple, in fact.

With that, the whammying subsides. As always, we’ll be keeping you posted here on SRB2.org and our social media accounts. Thanks for playing!

Our double whammy is now a triple whammy. Guess we needed one more release candidate, but we were just so excited to launch that we forgot. Here’s an update that makes netgames work correctly again, plus some bonus bug fixes and optimizations.

• Fixed renderhitbox causing netgame instability
• Fixed floorsprite rendering causing a possible crash if the sprite had a size of 1×1
• Fixed hitbox interpolation when scaling mobjs
• Optimized sprite rendering in the software renderer
• Exposed skin.supername to Lua

More details about this changelog are on our GitLab. Grab the update from the usual place. See you soon with the REAL conclusion!

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!

Hello everybody! We’re happy to inform you that another fantastic SRB2 update has landed on your doorstep. Here are the key changes in SRB2 v2.2.11:

• Removed the framerate limit: Using interpolation, SRB2 can now run at far more than 35fps, allowing for smoother looking 60fps gameplay (or much higher on supported monitors). You can set a custom limit at the bottom of Video Options.
• Fixed error 503: This prevented some players from accessing the ingame Master Server browser. If you’ve been having trouble using the Master Server, give it another try.
• Support larger characters in ERZ: Addon characters with large collision boxes, such as Ryder the Falcon, can now complete ERZ. We introduced some new gravity-related elements you can add to your maps as a part of this fix. Read about them here.
• Added support for the Universal Doom Map Format (UDMF): UDMF is a more flexible and powerful map format that allows for easier editing and more complex level designs. This long-awaited feature is a game-changer for mappers, opening up new possibilities for custom levels.
  • The implementation isn’t set in stone. We intend to make changes to it based on mappers’ feedback if necessary.
  • The UDMF map editor is not complete. Until it is complete, you can find the latest build pinned in #udmf on our Discord server.
  • You can convert your existing map to the new format, but older levels should continue to work as normal (let us know if they don’t!)
  • UDMF maps are allowed to be submitted to the OLDC!
• Better rendering in large levels: Levels that used to break the renderer by the sheer size of their rooms should be far more visually stable now.
• Improved Lua command/cvar safety and added basic rate limitation for Lua file access: Helps prevent addons from writing too much data to hard disk, among other things.

There are plenty of other bug fixes and other improvements. Check out the changelog for a complete list.

We appreciate your continued support and feedback as we work on our favorite project. You would probably appreciate heading over to our downloads page to get the new patch and start playing. Enjoy!

Hey everybody! I hope spring is treating you all well. We are thrilled to announce that the OLDC is officially back after all these months!

In case you missed it, the OLDC is no longer a contest. It has become a purely collaborative event. Check out this news post to catch up. We concluded that article with the news that OLDC submissions would be closed until our new rules were in place, and now that they’re published, I’d like to talk through some of the changes with you.

First, the collab divisions have changed. There are now only four of them, all part of base SRB2: Single Player, Circuit, Match, and Capture the Flag. We know there are still a good number of Battle fans out there, but we’ve run into logistical issues that prevent us from including its game modes. On the plus side, this means there only has to be one file per pack from now on, which should hopefully make adding the OLDC pack to your game a little easier.

The second and most important change to the event is the new requirement that all participants must be members of our Discord server in addition to having an SRB2MB account in good standing (read: not banned). During our last few events, we have used a private Discord channel for event participants to talk in, where they helped each other test maps, fix bugs, and more. It is now the most important source of map feedback for all submitters, and discussion there leads to an overall better final map pack for everyone to enjoy. But why require every participant to be there? Well, submitters who chose not to be present there simply weren’t there to get all the important feedback, and therefore they couldn’t use that feedback to improve their maps before each pack launched. We believe that this phase of private group testing, bug fixing, and feedback is so important that we are requiring all participants to be a part of it. We have even moved the submission process to Discord — you won’t be submitting OLDC entries via the Message Board anymore.

Third, I’d like to mention that each OLDC pack from here on out will have the permissions set for anyone to maintain it, but not make major modifications to it. This is a more lenient approach compared to previous packs, which were fully barred from being ported or otherwise modified by anyone outside of event participants and staff. (If you weren’t aware, the simple “reusable” vs. “non-reusable” system we used to have for addons submitted to the Message Board is gone; it’s been replaced with new options you can read about here.)

Finally, some minor details: In the past, we required maps to work properly in the software renderer and not cause crashes. We still require maps not to crash, but we have expanded the requirement for maps to work properly to include both software and OpenGL rendering modes. It’s fine if one render mode doesn’t look quite right, though, as long as the level remains playable in it. We are willing to make exceptions for submitters who don’t have computers capable of running both render modes, but please note you will need to hand off your map to other participants in order to have it fixed in time for release. Also, custom music and sound effects must be converted to OGG format (quality level 0). We’ve included a link to how to do this within the event rules. [EDIT: A small handful of other formats are now allowed for music as well — see full rules for details.] Last but not least, we have lifted the restriction on the amount of maps you’re allowed to submit. Please keep in mind that you should be striving for quality over quantity when you make maps to submit, though — don’t spread yourself too thin!

That’s it! The submission deadline is Saturday, July 1st at 6:59PM EST. Be sure to check out the full rules before you submit, and make sure your entry complies with them. We’re stoked to get this event off the ground, and we hope you are too! See you soon!