My planned Total Annihilation Clone.

[Xon]

I've long been interested in programming and have been a hobbyist programmer for several years now. I've just entired 2nd year of my Computer Science degree, and the most important stuff I'm learning so far, and probable for the rest of the degree is software design.

I'm planning on making a Total Annihilation clone, which will read existing TA game content but use, hopefully, a more extendable & flexiable engine. I'm using Delphi aka Object Pascal, my language of choice, to implement it and am planning for my TA Clone to use language independant dlls for various stuff.

Almost all game logic will be implemented using scripting, with the language being used based on pascal. The scripting engine I plan to use, can integrate very well with native Delphi code and vis versa.

While I have a proto-type engine framework, it is nowere near complete. What I'm currently working on are the tools the game will use. These tools will also be usable with Original Total Annihilation. I'm just about to release an animated/static image viewer for TA, with the editor version in the pipeline. Other tools include a compiler/decompiler for the existing TA script, the 3d object modeling software(basicly a standalone convertor, which allows for importing & exporting), GUI editor & mapping utilities.

The Compiler/decompiler will be able to compile/decompiler existing TA scripts as well as convert TA scripts to the new scripting language. I've had experience with compilers and have already written a prototype decompiler for TA scripts.

The GUI editor will be a WYSIWYG editor, with the code behind the GUI elements being a script. I might also make a version which allows you to produce GUIs for TA. But this would be very very limited with no way to extend the actions the GUI elements can do. However should be good for skinning.

There are a few reasons I'm posting this here:
1) I'm sure there are other programmers here, and I need to discuss some design issues I have.
2) Fishing for beta testers for when my TA clone is ready for testing or when I have other apps ready for testing (I do closed beta tests)
3) www.tauniverse.com are very inactive and just dont have the user active base I would need to get good reliable testers. Here there are more active people, more chances to find people willing to do some grunt work.
4) Testing the waters, I want to see how popular this type of thing would be on a non-TA board.
5) sd.net has a higher number of people who can think logically, which is what I need in a beta tester, and more importantly they are the most vocal & active.

What I'm asking for:
1) People who have knowledge in game programming, and software design. I need people to talk to, to hammer out details which would take me vastly longer todo by my self and to get advice from.
2) People willing to test my programs, which are potentially unstable, and Accurately tell me what when wrong, when something goes wrong and the steps they took to cause it. Bad: "It doesnt work", Good: "when I do <blah> and <blah> this <blah> happens"
3) People who can design good GUIs!

What I'm not asking for:
1) People volunteering to 'help' administer this project. This is mostly for a learning experience, for me
2) Webspace, I've already got my own website(free & no ads too!) and I dont think I'll grow beyond that soon.
3) Forums. I've got my own private forum at annihilated, which I am a forum co-admin of. But if Wong offers me a forum here, I'm fairly sure I wouldnt object (depending on conditions)

Later when I actually have a game engine which can do something, I'll ask for people to help put together the game logic (scripting).

I'm using Pascal, not C/C++, not C#, not Java, not Visual Basic, but Pascal. I know Java, learning C/C++, but Object Pascal is what I've used the longest and have a large amount of work already done in it. The scripting language I'm going to use is also pascal, I also have experience with it and it suits my needs very well.

Depending on responces, I'll post more latter.