Multiplayer challenges in/for 3.1+

[NoQ]

I seem to have encountered some serious talk on this relatively popular and relatively pointless topic.

We have "challenges" as an alternative for the single player skirmish mode. They fix the teams and game setup and allow setting up alternative AIs for some enemies.

Now if we pack AIs into the map, they will be injected into the base game, bypassing the map-mod support mechanism (not breaking the game, but it is still not what we want). The known workaround is to pack the AI scripts into a non-standard directory (eg. /challenges/), see also this thread.

So, even if it may sound like skirmish challenges are a convenience feature that can be perfectly emulated by manually setting up the same skirmish game all the time, in fact it isn't so. In fact, we're seriously relying on technical ability of challenges to make use of alternative AIs safely.

Now suppose we want to make a multiplayer challenge (a 2 humans vs. 6 AIs fixed-teams compstomp or something like that). As shown above, we can't really emulate a multiplayer challenge by simply setting up the game in the same way defined nowhere but in our note book every time. When we want to pack extra AI scripts for the players, it won't work the way we want.

So the suggestion is to make a "Challenges" button in the multiplayer game menu as well. The thing it is supposed to do is pretty similar.

[milo christiansen]

Don't forget that challenges allow you to also specify a rules file, for example I made one a while ago where if you win you lose and if you lose you win