Since the dust has settled somewhat on the Q&A session and some of the answers have brought a few unwelcome truths home. I've pretty much come to terms with the idea that there is no rescue ship coming for clod, and that what we have now is pretty much what we will need to make do with for the next couple of years until the Sequel™ is released.
With that in mind, I am starting to wonder what we can do to make the best of it. The half dozen or so patches over the last eighteen months have fixed and broken things in fairly equal measure, and it's hard to point at any one update and say which was the best. Each had their merits and their... well, lets not dwell on that.
Last night I downloaded Kegetys' Clodmod activator (
http://www.kegetys.fi/misc/ ) and did a dump of all of the game's files.
It is interesting to look through the gizzards of the thing and see how it is made. The original Il-2 series is just as interesting, and indeed it is remarkable how similar the two are in layout. the Effects folders and files for example will look very familiar to anyone who has some hands on experience with Il-2 modding.
The interesting bit was when I considered that the files in front of me were for the
latest version of the game. What If I rolled back the
previous patch and made a dump of that version and compared the differences? What if I did the same for the ones before that, or the V1 Collectors Edition?
Maybe it would be possible to pull some of the best bits out of each version and make a sort of compilation mod. Get the decent looking Spit's weathering layer from the early build and use it instead of the messy current one for example. Extract the earlier landshading files and use them instead. Tweak the tree textures, fix the dust particles, revert to a Hurricane FM that will start up...
There are a lot of things we can do. The files are right there in the open once you extract them. Nothing much seems hashed or encrypted and just about everything can be opened in notepad. It would be baby steps at first, but those who were around during the early days of Il-2 modding at AAA would remember how things started out. It was an exciting time, exchanging ideas and techniques. Learning about the game and how it all worked.
Anyone with experience in modding work, I'd urge you to take a look inside Cliffs Of Dover. There is a lot to see. If anyone can recall elements of previous patches or versions that had things that were working nicely and are now busted... maybe speak up and link to the patch in question. Maybe we can fix things after all!