We would all like to wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Many Sir. Community members are currently spending time with their families, and we'd like to encourage everyone else to do the same. Take care and enjoy the holiday season!
November 25, 2009 Happy Thanksgiving!
Everyone here at The Sir. Community wishes you a happy and safe Thanksgiving! Be thankful for what you have and don't take anything for granted, you never know if it's going to be there the next day.
Posted by Sir. AAK625
August 1, 2009 BF2: Takeshi's Castle
Today, we are proud to present another Battlefield 2 film from the mind of Sir. XaliaS. Many of you are undoubtedly familiar with the Japanese TV show "Takeshi's Castle," perhaps best known for the U.S. parody dubbed MXC. Across the pond in the United Kingdom (XaliaS's homeland), the show is hosted by Craig Charles. With the help of the Sandbox mod, Sir. XaliaS has recreated an episode of the show in Battlefield 2 for your amusement. Click the image to the right to watch it!
We hope you're having a great summer! As you can see, here at the Sir. Community we've remained loyal to Battlefield 2 with our modding projects like Sandbox and films from Sir. XaliaS. However, with the PC releases of Battlefield 1943 and Bad Company 2 later this year, we hope to branch out and bring you some new experiences in the Battlefield series. As always, stay tuned!
Posted by Sir. Elxx
May 10, 2009 Sandbox 1.0 Released
After nearly two years of development, open betas, closed betas, and secret semi-open-but-really-closed betas, Sandbox 1.0 has finally been released.
What's new in this version of Sandbox? I'm glad you asked.
Sandbox 1.0 brings lots of improvements and new features to the table. The first thing you'll notice is the totally revamped interface. We've added a simplified server browser that lets you hop into a game quickly without having to worry about messing with the server filters. Once you start playing, you'll notice the new spawn buttons that feature pictures of each of the 195 spawnable objects and vehicles. Of course, Sandbox 1.0 includes an even greater variety of vehicles from the world of Battlefield 2, as well as some custom vehicles from great BF2 modders like SatNav.
The kit selection screen has been streamlined with the ability to spawn with any of the core BF2 kits from all three teams, in addition to the usual Construction and Zombie kits you know so well. To help those with aspirations of reconstructing Burj Dubai, we've added a jetpack to the construction kit that lets you quickly fly around without worrying about taking damage crashing into things.
The previous release of Sandbox brought you the ability to "group" your creations and save them online, making it so much easier to trap your friends in boxes when they weren't looking. With this release, we're introducing the ability to animate your objects and groups. You can build a garage with a door that opens, a house with a functioning elevator, or a death box that crushes your friend to death after you've trapped him inside. Sandbox is truly fun for all ages!
Over the years, Sandbox has had an awesome community of fans that have modified our code to add their own features. We can say with confidence that Sandbox would not still be going without these adventorous coders. To help you guys out, we've completely rebuilt the gameplay logic from the ground up, allowing for addons to be created that easily plug in and add new features to Sandbox. It is now much easier to customize Sandbox to your liking and make sure your server is the most popular one of all. The guide to creating addons is already accessible on the Sandbox Wiki so you can get a head start.
As with previous versions, we highly encourage everyone to post their creations, large or small, in our showcase section found here!
Posted by Sir. Elxx
February 26, 2009 rFactor Rundown 2008
Our good friend and movie director Sir. XaliaS has created an 8-minute rFactor video for a video competition run by fan site rFactor Central. It's not exactly related to Sir. nor Battlefield, but I think it still deserves to be showcased. Check it out:
Here are XaliaS's own comments on the video:
It's been a learning experience from to go; I barely had enough time to complete it yet alone polish it to a standard I would have liked, I started shooting only 2 days before the deadline when I finally got the time off.
Work Times:
8-10 hours filming. 12-15 hours editing. 6 hours encoding - 3 versions. 5 hours uploading. (Thanks HD)
Definitely the fastest 48 hours of my life. I actually submitted the video before I completed it. It only cost me a weekend to make. :-)
So about the film, I'm brand new to the rFactor film scene but I've been gaining enthusiasm for rFactor for a few years. Bringing over my experience with BF2 machinima I'm used to having total control over where and how I use the camera. I appreciate in rFactor it's a little more difficult with the free cam; being inherently jerky, though I try to be as smooth as possible. Using track cameras for the whole film would have been unacceptable.
I designed for a natural progression through the film while trying to be unique via the undertaking of small micro-story elements throughout the scenes at a medium pace with upbeat music and exciting action, rather than just a montage of random clips bogged down on emotion. It features a cocktail of music segments courtesy of Immediate Music, Corner Stone Cues, Muse and Hybrid.
It wasn't perfect with the amount of footage I was rushing to capture but some moments worked as I hoped. I also planned to give each mod is own 'spotlight' time, which again was very difficult without drawing things out, a lot of the shots had to be cut when it was nearing the 10 minute mark.
The film focuses on the cars more than the tracks, and composed in a way that groups certain cars into visually logical groups or themes. Some are more serious than others, it's not my style to cut inside jokes from the final cut if I happen to capture them, so if you find a few small things humorous, chances are it was intentional. I hope it shows rFactor for what it is, full customization, any car on any track against any class, immersion and user made content, the greatest strength of rFactor against other racing sims.
Posted by Sir. Elxx