C&C Generals: Situation Zero mod

A lot of things have happened these past few years. It all started with a great man and his dream. His dream to make the greatest ZH mod, the world had ever seen. This dream was no small feat, it was a tremendous undertaking, an undertaking, dwarfed only by the man's great ambition. His project inspired and captivated many members of the community, as no-one had ever seen anything like it before. It came to a point where it seemed the man would "rule the world", with his great vision.

Unfortunately, his dream was short lived. Killed by a horrible chain reaction of events, started by a simple mistake. No-one saw it coming. No-one could stop it. However the world moves on, and even though it is largely unfinished, this dream is too big to just be locked up and ignored.

On behalf of Fincer and the SZ Team, we hope you will enjoy the dream as much as we enjoyed brining it into reality.
Thank you and goodbye.

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Update, 7th January 2024 by Fincer

I would like to thank one of my earlier team members who decided to publish this mod here back in the day. Although there was no my permission, I did not object this decision then. And I still don't. Never had, actually. On the contrary.

The alpha version released here, is the only public version of this mod - loyal to my original SZ vision. We had another "reworked" version within the SZ team in progress but it was never published. Why is that? Where and *why* did the development of the new version of SZ mod stop? What happened?

I think it's finally time to open up some old wounds. This mod was really "killed by a horrible chain reaction of events", as said over 13 years ago.

When I was the only developer of this mod in 2003-2008, I had ideas to rework the flora, naval shipyards, improve multiple tank models and improve the mod's stability (due to well known gameplay crashes). I saw a lot of hidden & unleashed potential. Especially in 2008.

However, as a solo modder, I quickly saw improving the mod quality or implementing new features was an impossible task resource wise without additional man power. Thus, I decided to organize a team to speed up the development process because I saw so many improvement points (TODOs) which could have been carried out but I couldn't simply do it alone.

So, decided to organize a team to improve the development process in 2008. It was very unfortunate coincidence, but I had very limited time to the mod development in 2008 and thus, I couldn't fully contribute to critical decicion making related to development paths we'd like to take nor have small talk with team members all the time. In the SZ team, we still had ideas to rework the whole mod but in the end, there were some serious project management & leadership issues due to my inability to contribute to the project in full due to real life constraints. This is why I take the responsibility here.

The situation escalated so that organizing the specific tasks to various team members was very difficult since the team ultimately divided into "two sub teams" (to one which favored my ideas, and the rest of the team favored other member's ideas over mine so we had "two leaders" issue there). Results? We had some serious internal disagreements which, in the end, led to Situation Zero mod project failure.

Due to this failure, I lost motivation to develop the mod, to give tasks to SZ team members and stopped contributing to the mod development in any way, and moved on in life. This decision was very unfair to other team members and I still regret it sometimes.

The version we developed internally in the team, was never released to the public. We had some progress as shown in published media updates here but that's it. I think I still have these media update assets in my old HDDs but as I've not developed them, I see it's still unfair to publish them, too.

In it's own decade, the Situation Zero mod project was a dream to improve C&C Generals in every way possible. Ultimately, the mod project failed due to several facts: 1) SAGE game engine technical constraints/crash issues (which could not be bypassed and limited my original vision), 2) project management failure (due to multiple reasons) & lack of my personal time to the project leadership & management 3) lack of dev resources & failure of distinguish dev roles within the team.

However, to remind you: That all was ages ago. We talk about years 2003-2008 (my solo dev time) & 2008-2010 (SZ team dev time). That all happened some 13-20 years ago. Years have passed, team members have moved on, and so am I.

I wish all former members have learnt some valuable lessons from this project failure they could have used later in life for their own benefit. It's very obvious I have learnt the lessons in the hard way, as well, and of course, I wouldn't do the same mistakes again or, at least, would actively avoid them. This project taught me a lot from technical aspects, project management and still, after these years, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the mod development back in the day. I would also like to thank everyone who still enjoy or, in the past, enjoyed playing the Situation Zero mod.

- Fincer, 7th January 2024