Challenge maps in Portal 2?
OK, so as I've stated repeatedly in other threads I'm really disappointed by the lack of challenge maps / advanced chambers in Portal 2. It feels like the content is _almost_ there, it just needs the proper wrapping to make it work.
If we could create the right *.bms files (or whatever the equivalent is in P2) so that we could launch specific Portal 2 single-player maps and start the player at the correct position, I think we could "create" some fairly interesting challenges.
There's some pretty major open questions though:
1) Does Portal 2 even support any kind of challenge? I mean does the engine actually support doing a timed run, a least portals run and/or a least steps run? We can't really know yet, since the game obviously didn't ship with any, but I find it likely that they'd have the functionality in there somewhere.
2) Is it possible to modify player spawn position outside a .bsp? I'm thinking some of the mappers here should be able to answer that. If not many of the single-player chambers that would otherwise work might not be that good since a lot contain too much fluff around the actual puzzle bit.
I'm gonna spend some time over easter trying to see if I can peek into the inner workings of P2 and see what can be found. Now if only it had installed it next to Portal 1 so I knew where to look 
OK finding it was not hard. It's in Steam/steamapps/common/portal 2.
And look what I found in portal 2/portal2/scripts/bonus_maps_manifest.txt:
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bonus_maps_manifest
{
"dir" "scripts/advanced_chambers"
"dir" "scripts/challenges""search" "maps" [$WIN32]
"map" "scripts/challenges/challenges.bns" [$GAMECONSOLE]
"map" "scripts/advanced_chambers/advanced_chambers.bns" [$GAMECONSOLE]
}
I'd say that is pretty promising
After looking through the files present and inside the VPK files I can unfortunately not find a single *.bns file. Also there's a dire lack of an actual menu entry that would actually use them, so I'm a bit stumped by now. Better keep looking...
Speaking of menus however extending the Extras menu is very easy:
Hm, wonder if these will be way too big:
This makes me wish for a BBCode to include an image, but scaled down :S
BTW that was done by editing portal2/scripts/extras.txt:
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"Extras"
{
...snip...
"twp"
{
"title" "TWP"
"subtitle" "www.thinking.withportals.com"
"pic" "vgui/extras/attract_panels"
"url" "https://www.thinking.withportals.com/"
}
}
Aha, extras.txt can also be used to launch maps, so this might be a way to trigger directly the maps that could do with some bns love:
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"Extras"
{
...snip...
"trustflings"
{
"title" "Trust Flings"
"subtitle" "Chamber 06 - Advanced Aerial Faith Plates"
"map" "sp_a2_trust_fling"
}
}
I can't do it right now, but have you tried typing "sv_bonus_challenge #" into the console?
(# being a number between 1 and 3)
(# being a number between 1 and 3)
I have not, I'll get right on that. Do I have to have a map already loaded? Or does it apply to subsequent map loads?
(Right now I'm compiling a list of test chamber #XX -> map filename since that's less than obvious from the map names this time round.)
It only does it if you type it in then load the map.
For reference: