Christmas will be late this year...

Bugs in Team Fusion mod 4.0 for Cliffs of Dover.
You'll have to live with them a bit longer...

Is 'scope creep' starting to plague Team Fusion?

The team modding Cliffs of Dover has just announced that while a preview video of mod 4.01 may be released around Christmas, the bug fix won't be ready until later.

In their latest update the team stated:

Right now there are two tiers of work going on in TF.

1) Finalization of beta 2 TF 4.01 (sorry can't give you a deadline, this is a bigger patch than we expected, so taking longer, many more new elements)

2) Longer term work is underway in many different areas for TF 5.0.

In the meantime, we expect to post a promo for TF 4.01, not sure if it will be after Christmas or after New Years, that will depend on the release of TF 4.01.

(We acknowledge up front it behoves everyone to be patient...remember these guys are all volunteers and do this in their own spare time).

Team Fusion released their version 4.0 update on 18 October, but while it introduced some nice new features like improved GFX/frame rates, more and better clouds, and some new aircraft variants like the Blenheim IVF and an armed Sunderland, it basically broke CoD for offline players trying to use the new version of the mod.

The reason was that another feature included in mod 4.0 was the modelling of stiffer controls as dive speed increases in fighters. Great for online flyers, but the game AI was not able to cope, with the result the AI becomes lawn darts whenever it gets in a dive. So TF has been telling single player fans to stick with its previous mod 3.01.

This lawn dart bug, and several others causing game crashes and game freezes were to be fixed in mod 4.01, but it seems that in their desire to keep adding new material to mod 4.01, instead of just fixing the bugs in mod 4.0, delays are creeping in. 

For example TF has announced it will be adding Enlightened Florists' dynamic campaign generator to the game in mod 4.01 as well. Why deliver something users haven't asked for, instead of just fixing what is broken, as quickly as possible? 

This is typical scope creep behaviour unfortunately - the original IL2 team was legendary for it, and it seems Team Fusion has caught the bug too!