Sorry to interrupt, but who is TD exactly? Is that who "took over" on IL-2 after Oleg moved on, or something like that?
TD or DT stands for "Daidalos Team" or "Team Daidalos". They are a group of modders (perhaps a dozen or so initially, possibly fewer now) who officially have exclusive rights to continue development of IL2:1946, mostly because they contacted Oleg/1c and asked for permission to do so.
Daidalos Team agreed to abide by certain rules and development restrictions which applied to the original game. The exact terms of their agreement with 1c are secret, but they have said that they are limited in the following ways:
* No content prohibited to the original IL2:1946 game due to the Northrop-Grumman consent decree with Ubisoft/1c. This means most American ships, and all Northrop, Grumman or Ryan aircraft are off limits. Furthermore, there can be no upgrades for Grumman aircraft which already exist in the game, so there will never be an "official" flyable TBF Avenger, no new Hellcat models, and the "official" Hellcat cockpits will always suck.
* Nothing that breaks the laws in a country where 1c/Ubisoft operates. This means no swastikas by default on Luftwaffe planes because the swastika is banned in Germany, and restricted in many other European countries.
* Polygon counts for ordinance, ground objects, aircraft, etc. must be limited to more or less conform to the original computer requirements to run the game. There has been some relaxation of the rules here, but basically any object developed for DT has to be relatively lower in polygons compared to mods.
* All new content must follow copyright restrictions. This means no porting objects, etc. from other games into IL2 without official permission from the copyright holder - even if it's another Ubisoft or 1c game. Maps must also use non-copyrighted textures, so no textures based on Google Maps or similar are allowed.
* All new content must be of equal quality to that included in the original game. This means no "franken-planes", no cockpits ported from other aircraft, no models with missing LoD (level of detail) models, shadow models, hooks, etc.
* Content must be focused on air combat from approximately 1939-45, although they're not against developing content for earlier or later conflicts from the 1930s to 1950s, like the Spanish Civil War or the Korean Conflict.
Because of their special relationship with 1c/Ubisoft, Daidalos Team got access to the original IL2: 1946 ver. 4.09 source code and development tools. Any updates that they release to the game represent legal, official, sanctioned content by 1c/Ubisoft, making the 4.13.1 version of the game the official "stock" version which, legally, everyone is supposed to be using.
It's quite likely that TD is required to take steps to defend 1c/Ubisoft's intellectual property rights, which means that might be forced to take steps to discourage "unauthorized use" of the IL2 source code by other mod teams - especially teams which are actually modifying IL2's game engine rather than just making graphic add-ons.
One of the most effective ways that they've found to discourage other modders is by making widespread changes to the code with each new update. This "breaks" most mods until modders can discover work-arounds or methods of "repairing" the DT code so that it's compatible with mods.
Initially, they "played nice" and made changes which were easy enough to detect and repair. With the 4.12 patch and later, however, they've been making their code much harder to repair, which causes massive headaches for modders and the folks who enjoy using mods.
The overarching problem is that there are far more "unofficial" modders than there are members of Daidalos Team, and "unofficial" modders work much faster than DT does to fix bugs in the stock game and to add new content. In many cases, content produced by "unofficial" modders equals or exceeds the quality of TD's work. Certainly mod packs like C.U.P., HSFX, and their predecessors add far more content, and fix far more problems with the stock game, than DT possibly could.
That leads to a situation where TD is no longer in a leadership position in the modding community, leaving many modders to wonder why TD still has "official" status.
Personally, I think that there are areas where TD does good work. They set high standards for themselves, even if they don't always meet them. Certainly, there are some TD members who seem like perfectly decent, honorable people. I've had good luck working with them, albeit in a very minor way.
On the other hand, it seems like other members of the team are abusing their authority, treating unofficial modders with contempt, and possibly stealing content from the unofficial modding community and calling it their own. That's some seriously bad stuff, and I don't blame the hard working high-level modders on this forum for blowing their stacks at Daidalos Team for what they've done.
