Mods and challenges

I’ve written about this a little bit on my blog here:
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2015/04/04/supporting-modded-content/

Specifically with regards to having mods in the game, and yet still being able to post challenges without getting into a mess, or annoying people without those mods who then can’t play. I think we can all agree this system wasn’t done that well in GSB1, and I’ve been making efforts over the last two days to improve the situation for GSB2.
The feature that annoyed me the most was this nuts reliance on the player to select or deselect check boxes based on what modded content they ‘guessed’ was in the challenge. Yikes :smiley:

The new system does this:

In other words it automatically goes through all of the ships in your fleet, works out which mods you are (or are not) using, and displays them on the submit dialog 9and also submits that data to the server). This way you can at least tell what the requirements will be for players who want to enjoy that challenge.
I haven’t coded any back-end support for arranging this data and making it available to the player yet, to prevent them running unsupported challenges but I’ll work on that.

My dream scenario would be to embed download links to modded content (would have to be hosted by me, or steam workshop, to prevent malicious use) within such a dialog, so mods could naturally spread throughout the community through their inclusion in popular challenges.
Well I can dream right? :smiley:

sounds posible

Its possible, but a bit tricky because some mods will be hosted on steam workshop, and others hopefully on my site. I do need to set up a dedicated mod page for this anyway… Also the mods are only currently referenced by name, and I don’t have a way to prevent two mods having the same name yet :frowning:

couldn’t the program add the author’s name (if the author was kind enough to included it) to the end of it?