Quote:
Originally Posted by bf-110
If wasn't because of them,IL2 would be still on 4.08
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Perhaps is time for a little IL-2 history lesson, because many new players probably have no idea how the sim was developed. I've seen many people saying that 1C MG did stupid thing by not utilizing the works of modders and not making the IL-2 moddable in the first place. Well little do they know that there was a long period of so called 3rd party development. Sort of "legal modding". It started right after the very first IL-2 was released. Here is little blast from the past:
http://replay.web.archive.org/200211...il2center.com/
http://replay.web.archive.org/200112...il2center.com/
http://replay.web.archive.org/200211...il2center.com/
Anyone could make a reservation of some plane for himself and model it according to the sim specs. If it was done properly and sent to MG, it appeared later in some free patch or commercial add-on. If it was in add-on, the modeller got paid for his work.
My estimation is that probably half of the currently existing plane external & cockpit 3D models were made by the community members. The "first generation of modders". Called 3rd party members back then. The whole initial idea of TD was to gather these 3rd party guys back together and continue the old style quality development and ask some of the most talented modders to join.
This means that TD has many guys that were these old 3rd party guys and these guys have created just huge amount of 3D content for this sim. Planes, cockpits, ships, ground objects and even maps. I find it always pretty funny when some modder speaks crap about TD without realizing that is was some guy in TD who actually made his own mod possible.
Without the 3rd party guys (including several TD guys) there would be about 50% less raw materials for the "new" mod planes and lot less ships & ground objects, etc. So I think that it is pretty big middle finger aimed towards the old 3rd party guys if the 3rd party efforts are ignored and mods are raised on pedistal because they have made hundreds of "new" planes (from which the most of are variants of the existing planes). It takes 5 minutes to put wrong cockpit to old AI planes. It takes easily 6 months to model a historically correct pit.
I would even say that 4.09 & 4.10 was pretty much nothing compared to the full efforts of 3rd party. But at least TD is trying to maintain the same standards set by the best 3rd party work such as Tempest & Gladiator. Which means that TD won't put wrong cockpits to AI planes to make it flyable or release CR.42 as Hs 123, etc.
Bottom line: Thanks to the 3rd party efforts long before any modding, IL-2 now has huge amount of raw material that modders can recycle as new planes and use as objects in their maps. And not a single mod has ever given credits to a 3rd party guy who made the mod possible in the first place. These guys are all mentioned in readme files, but the average modder just doesn't care.