Good evening everyone,
I'm Michael, and having been invited to SotP recently by Lavo, I thought I should introduce myself. First of all, I should probably say that I'm into SotP because it is a Sins mod, not because it is a Halo mod. I've actually never played any of the Halo games.
I've come to Sins modding via Lavo's Sins of a Galactic Empire mod, for which I was only a lowly playtester at first. Then I realised that it would take me about as long to write up some of my bugs as it would take me to actually fix them, and I started doing that. After wearing Lavo down with a stream of pull requests on Bitbucket, he finally caved and gave me write access to the SoGE repository. ;-)
Being a CS masters student, I helped Lavo avoid a number of boring drudgework tasks by writing automated scripts. That was about the point where I realized that basically all of Sins modding consists of text files. And text files can be parsed into objects and after that, you can do everything with them in a programming language. At that moment, my hubris kicked into overdrive. I decided to recreate a Sins mod in Python, for the purpose of automated checking of just about everything. Staring with the syntax of the text files like entities, to checking that all referenced files like models or sound files are actually present.
That piece of software, or at least what currently exists of it, made Lavo ask me if I would check SotP too. Which naturally I'm happy to do, and have already done in the past week. To the devs: I'm that M Meier who keeps peskering you with Pull Requests. ;-) Sorry for not having introduced myself earlier.
I intend to make said Python tool publicly available someday. But at the moment, it is mostly a loose collection of functions and classes, utterly unuseable for laypeople. Besides that, I'm also decidedly embaressed about some of the code. For the time being, it is better that no person shall risk his sanity by laying eyes on that Lovecraftian horror. ;-)
In addition to automated checks, I will also use my access to the Dev version to play SotP and report any bugs, should I find them.
Finally, I would like to say thanks to all the SotP modders. As I've said to Lavo quite often, I suffer from a complete lack of visual creativity or any kind of artistic sense or skill. I respect those who do posses those skills the more for it.