The Dawn of the Tiberium Age is a stand-alone Tiberian Sun to Tiberian Dawn (C&C 95/Gold) total conversion which aims to allow people to both play and mod TD, while having all of the benefits of the TS engine. With version 1.10 of DTA the "enhanced mode" was also introduced; you get to pick whether you want to play the classic or enhanced mode when you start the game. The enhanced mode aims to improve/enhance the gameplay you're used to from TD by adding new features (like the XO Powersuit, the "Spawn visceroids" super weapon and naval battles) and refining the game balance (prices, speeds, damage, range, etc.).
 

This mod is already a couple years old and even though I don't remember exactly when I started work on this mod, I found an image on my hard drive which dates back to the 26th of January 2006, which must've been just about the time I started working on it.

DTA obviously has progressed a lot since then

The mod started out as a private mod and I worked on it on my own without really telling anyone about it. The mod's progress went rather slow at first and sort of died until Morpher mentioned to me he had an idea for a mod which I basically already had been working on for a while myself. I told him about it and suggested to him that since Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert mostly use the same terrain, he could start working on a TS to RA total conversion, which once it was finished could be merged with my own mod so we'd have a single mod in which you'd be able play with both TD and RA factions. He agreed to this and I got motivated to start my mod over again. We agreed to keep the mod quiet for at least shortly before we'd actually release it, because we'd be pressurized less that way and we'd be able give people a nice surprise when we actually would release it. Morpher progressed quite a bit with his mod and already had ported over most of the menus, sounds and unit and building graphics before he had to move to Australia after which he unfortunately didn't have enough time left to work on the mod (partially because of his Tiberian Odyssey mod, which was also taking up a lot of his time).
So the RA counterpart of DTA was discontinued, while the TD counterpart went back to flying solo.

I prefer to surprise people over making them wait a very long time and possibly even lose interest for the mod again before it'd even get released, so I stuck to my idea to keep the mod quiet and kept working on it on my own. Even though I was trying to only use SHP units in DTA and stay away from voxels, limitations of the TS engine forced me to use voxels for aircraft anyway. Since Muldrake was the best voxeler I knew at the time, I asked him make the voxels for the aircraft, shortly after which I finally made the mod public.

The first release of DTA had its fair share of bugs and the height of all buildings was stretched to 120%; it seemed like a good idea at the time because that way the buildings would all alook like they properly filled their foundations. Units also only had 8 facings (because with the TS engine, normally an SHP unit can only have 8 facings) and it wasn't until version 1.05 that CCHyper managed to hack the executable file in order to allow units to have 32 facings instead of 8, which is when it probably really became worth playing. With the release of DTA 1.07 I also finally restored the height of all buildings to what it was before I stretched them (yes, I finally realized it actually does look quite horrifying ).
Because of the difference in TD's and TS's terrain, it seemed close to impossible to properly port over the terrain from TD to TS (which apparently, actually was part of the reason why Morpher lost his motivation to continiue to work on DTA's RA counterpart) and I tried all sorts of things to get it to work until I finally decided to use buildings as terrain. The "building terrain" actually looked perfectly convincing in many circumstances, but it was actually a hell for mappers to work with and unfortunately the TS engine often also shows visual glitches whenever 2 SHPs overlap one another, which was especially troublesome with the roads (which is why they were the first to be replaced with real terrain). Another big problem was that since the terrain actually existed out of buildings, just like buildings a terrain piece would cloak if a stealth crate would be picked up next to them.

It wasn't until version 1.09 of DTA when I finally replaced all "building terrain" with real terrain. At first only Gangster was responsible for converting the terrain, but considering converting the terrain actually takes a lot of work and Gangster had more work on his plate than just DTA, Gangster's absence finally (thankfully) forced me to learn how to do it myself. Lin Kuei Ominae taught me how to use 3ds max to convert TD's terrain to isometric and I used his method to convert most of the terrain until DonutArnold eventually showed that Photoshop was actually just as capable for the job. For quite a while I considered to also convert RA's snow theater for DTA, but taking in mind how much work it was to convert DTA's temperate and desert theaters and how long it took me, I quickly decided against it. Maybe one day I'll change my mind, but don't count on it.

Before DTA, in mods that used new or modified graphics for tiberium, the tiberium always appeared black on the radar. This started to get on my nerves quite a bit after witnessing it in DTA for a while, so I finally opened up the files of the tiberium in a HEX editor and started messing around until I finally figured out how to fix this and wrote a tutorial on how to give tiberium proper radar colors so other mods wouldn't have to suffer from this problem anymore either. Nyerguds and IcySon55 also built a tool based on my tutorial to make this even easier for modders.
Another tutorial I wrote based on a discovery I made during the development of my mod was for how to give games hosted on XWIS a unique name for a mod.

For a while I actually considered to continue Morpher's work and include the RA factions myself, but as time went on and the development of DTA 1.10 progressed, it became obvious that I already had enough work on my plate with DTA as it is. Also considering certain limitations of the TS engine would make a bunch of features from RA1 impossible (most notably the chronosphere, iron curtain, the nuke and submarine's torpedoes), I actually wasn't even sure whether it'd even really be worth the effort (I'd naturally have to properly balance RA's factions out with GDI and Nod as well after all). So at least for now, I'm sticking with the factions DTA already has (which hopefully should make DTA already interesting enough). Maybe somewhere in the future I'll give it a shot anyways, but like before, I'm making no promises.
Also, since I'm allowing people to mod DTA 1.10, maybe somebody will even beat me to it