A new update from our friends over at the official SOCOM blog gives you the scoop on one of the highly anticipated feature updates in the upcoming 1.5 release for SOCOM Confrontation… the Tournament feature! Find out how tournaments will function with details on structure, registration, scheduling and teams. Read it all here…
Dev Notes
Smart People Work Here
So we have a lot of smart people who work here. It’s sort of a prerequisite on top of being superbly witty and incredibly funny, combined with really really good looking and, of course, humble. All jokes aside, our hard working engineers have been kind enough to offer access to some of their recent technical exploits. If you’re a fellow smart cookie (or, like me, just find yourself enamored with sequences of foreign looking mathematical functions that you can show to your friends and pretend you are smarter than they are) you’ll enjoy checking out our new Tech Papers section on the Dev Notes page. Guaranteed to make you 10% smarter, or atleast feel that way!
Another Update for Confrontation
Our friends over at Sony’s official SOCOM blog have posted a nice long list of the tweaks that you’re going to find in the shiny new 1.5 update for SOCOM Confrontation. Instead of making me type it all out again, how about you just click this handy link? Release dates will also come via the official blog but you are still welcome to pester us on Twitter. We love attention.
New Confrontation Patch Released
In our continued effort to support our ever growing community of Confrontation players, we’ve got another update ready to download. The 1.42 patch landed yesterday and addresses issues around player spawning, removal of voted out players, and extreme ragdoll values. Also, we’ve included some general bandwith optimization goodness!
Thanks again to all of you who continue to write and give feedback. You’re patience and support (and even the ranting and stomping of feet) is important to our efforts here. The team is hard at work on a 1.5 update that will continue to improve the online play experience, as mentioned at the official SOCOM blog. Now stop reading and go get that 1.42 update!
Slant Speaks at GDC 2009
Who is this guy and what does he have to say? Well, it’s Technical Director, Paul Martin, who once again has been invited to speak at an industry event. This time, Paul will leap technical hurdles and logistical buildings with his “Audio Adventures on the PS3″ which tackles SOCOM Confrontation from an audio perspective (in case you couldn’t glean that from the title).
You can see a detailed breakdown of just what will be discussed here. If you’re attending GDC, be sure to stop in and say hello on Friday morning at 10:30am. If you say you read about his talk on this blog, he might be nice enough to offer you a lollipop.
Inside the Artist’s Mind
David Denofreo, 3D Artist, is well known around our office for his fascination with photography. Here’s an overview of David’s latest vision and how he achieved such compelling results… don’t worry, no developers were actually harmed (physically) in the making.
I’ve had the idea of doing wide angle, unflattering portraits for a while now. It’s an interesting way to see a version of yourself. These are characters that we all have inside and some of us only see them in the bathroom mirror when you’re alone and the door is locked. To get in close and see every pore and hair, every little imperfection is a wonderful thing. People are not perfect and I’m grateful to those who are willing to share that with me.
I hope with these portraits, the subject is able to embraced their own imperfections and find humor in them. I would prefer to capture the awkward moments. The photo that is taken when someone has their eyes half open and in mid spoken word. The worst timing for a photo is what want.
With some faces, I would rather go for the extreme emotion.
The great thing is, everyone has a unique face. With every new shoot I learn what works with their face and who they are. I don’t always get it the first round, and I’m really happy that people are willing to come back for a second shoot so I can get it right.
How these portraits are done technically, is very easy.
Lens – Sigma 10-20mm
Software – Adobe Photoshop using the LucisArt 3 ED plugin for the simulated HDR look. Cross Processing and Bleach Pass done with Tiffen DFX plugin.
The hard part, and also one of the most enjoyable parts is working with the model. Trying to find that character they have inside is a lot of fun. Sometimes the character is right there and all it takes is for them to stick out their tongue! With other people I have to dig a bit deeper. I’ve only asked a couple of the people to participate in the beginning to get the ball rolling. The rest of the people in the collection have all asked me if they could participate after seeing the photos.
Developer Posts on SOCOM.com
Since we’ve got our own blog now, I thought it would be nice to have a link to the Developer Interviews on SOCOM.com. There are a series of six posts featuring our design director, Dave Seymour. He’s nice. You can follow him @david_seymour on Twitter if you can handle reading through the hundreds of enigmatic posts about Resident Evil 5 and new iPhone apps. I’m not exaggerating. He really loves Twitter.
