Update: The 1.50 Beta Update has been released! Head to the Official Battlefield Portal Site to download it now! Remember to post any and all feedback here in our forums! See you on the battlefield!

The Sir. Community is pleased to say that our Wake Island 2142 map will be released with the upcoming 1.50 patch for Battlefield 2142 along with Operation Shingle, made by our close friend, Jason Brice. We are ecstatic about this release, as it's the first community content ever converted into official game material. As stated on the official Battlefield portal, Battlefield.com, The Sir. Community has worked very closely with the DICE Live Team while producing this map and we'd like to thank them for this wonderful opportunity. However, we owe much of our success to an incredible group of people over at TacticalGamer.com. Through their maturity, team oriented play, tactical prowess, and good gaming morals, Wake Island 2142 went from an aesthetically pleasing landscape to a battlefield that will be thoroughly enjoyed by all.

We look forward to any and all feedback about the map when the open beta begins in the next few days. Keep in mind, just like everything in life, not everyone will be pleased. We guarantee, as a Sir. Community product, all feedback will be considered for the final release.

Exactly 1 year, 1 month, and 1 day after the last release of BattleDirector, we've got a new version ready for all you Battlefield filmmakers! Most importantly, it fixes the rampant crashes when viewing & rendering Battlerecorder files with the 1.4 patch for Battlefield 2142. Also, it adds support for the custom shaders used by the Project Reality and Forgotten Hope 2 modifications. There is also a small change to the filenames of camera track files for easier organization, so you may need to rename some existing camera tracks after updating.

The full changelog:

• Fixed crashes occurring with BF2142 version 1.40
• Added support for Project Reality and Forgotten Hope 2 custom launchers
• Added automatic detection of BF2 & BF2142 install locations
• Fixed a crash that occurred when Global.con was set to read-only
• BattleDirector now asks for administrator rights in Windows Vista
• Removed "Save Settings" button, settings are now saved automatically
• Camera track naming convention is now bfrname-trackname to match the default tracks Battlefield generates, you need to manually rename your existing camera tracks to this format if you want to use them with BattleDirector 1.7

Though it may have happened several weeks ago, the Sir. Community has finally bribed community member Sir. MatDef into writing a summary of his adventure at the Game Developers Conference 2008:

This year, once again the GDC was hosted in the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco, and since I was close enough to go (and had free tickets) I decided that I really had nothing better to do that day than wander around and see what all the excitement was about. I arrived, and was instantly amazed at the size of the conference. Thousands of developers were there bragging about their latest games, from Rare to Ubisoft and of course our favorite devs of all time, Dice. I went off in search of their booth to perhaps pummel a few of them but was distracted almost instantly by all the shiny hardware at Intel's booth. They had everything from dual quad core systems with 8800 Ultras to single quad core systems with dual ATI 3870 X2's (quite the hardware spectrum). After spending several hours staring and drooling at all the pretty flashing lights I realized that I was missing the main point of the GDC, the games! Far Cry 2 was running on a few computers, but the Ubisoft employees wouldn’t let any of the attendees actually play (which wasn't too bad, since it looked like all you could do with the current build was shoot branches off trees). There was plenty more to see and do, but I’m tired of writing so I'll let the pics speak for themselves.

See the full Flickr photoset...