I'm fairly widely known as the developer of the CnCNet Client that I first made for DTA and which has then conquered practically all of the Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 modding community. As such, I feel it's necessary to make the following announcement here:
I have retired from the lead developer's position on the client. Now, you might expect there to be some kind of juicy drama about it, but there is none. The boring truth is, I've moved on to other projects for personal reasons. In the past year or so I've been making contributions, reviewing others' code before merging it in to the main branch, assisted them and helped them plan on how to implement new features. However, with my other projects the pace at which I've provided code reviews and other assistance hasn't kept up with the demands of the contributors. Some pull requests have waited for reviews for over half a year, which has understandably been demotivating for them.
A few days ago when I learned that EA released the source code of the C&C Remastered Collection Map Editor, I forked it and made my own branch for enhancing it. I have fairly big plans for this project - we'll see if they get realized - and with this project eating my already limited time on C&C modding, I'd be even slower with providing assistance and code reviews for client contributors.
The first public version of the DTA Launcher in December 2011.
So, after almost 10 years, it's come time to move on. I built the client project as a CnCNet online play tool and updater for DTA at the age of 16 in 2011, on top of a setup tool made for DTA by Nyerguds. Since then it received multiple complete rewrites (including support for Iran's [a person, not the country] TS spawner in Dec 2013), until the current open-source MonoGame client blew everyone away in Autumn 2016 and conquered the modding scene in the next couple of years. I initially thought of retiring from the modding community in 2016 already, but writing the MonoGame-based client (along with a custom UI library for it) from scratch provided me with a fun programming challenge. With the overwhelming reception among both players and modders alike, making new features to support and enhance the client post-launch was also fun at first, but as my programming skills have improved over the years, the challenge faded away, and with the client being practically feature-complete for my dearest project (DTA), upkeeping the client and coordinating its development became less interesting and more of a chore.
From this announcement on, the client is maintained by the CnCNet team, with myself being a regular "contributor" among others. I'll still maintain DTA's version of the client myself, but builds for any other projects will be made by other people. I trust that the other client contributors, most notably Starkku and Kerbiter, will do a good job with it going forward, and I will still be providing assistance to them where it's necessary.
Thanks for all the support over the years, and I hope you're going to keep enjoying the client's capabilities (whether it's moddability, graphics, UI convenience or smooth online play for you) for the foreseeable future!
The client saw significant development over the years, eventually reaching its modern look in late 2016. Feature additions and improvements have continued since then to this day.
