Game

Starting on April 26th, 2003, paddle your own virtual canoe along the old voyageur highway from Montréal to the Athabasca and then onwards to the Pacific. With a bird's eye view, created using real satellite images of the great Canadian wilderness, you'll learn to negotiate some of the problems you'll face on the real adventure—wind, waves and weather (generated from actual Environment Canada weather stations); headlands, bays, lake-crossings, dams, rapids and portages; towns, motels, food-resupply and money; fitness, fatigue and rest; bears, bugs and boats; time-zones and autumnally shorter daylights hours; and let's not forget morale. Using a meticulously crafted simulation engine, the game plays out in accelerated real-time across a geodesically-curved Canada.

Sounds great, doesn't it? (You should see the reality!) Anyway, at our wintering post in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, we wrote about three-fifths of this fabulous canoe-tripping simulation game. Though we do intend to complete it, for the next few months there's another project we're trying to finish. So, in those infamous words:

Coming soon...

Estimated release date: late 2005

Programmed and distributed in 100% pure Java, it should run on any Java compatible operating system including Unix/Linux, Macintosh and Windows, though system and internet-connection speed requirements will probably be so high that you'll need to wait until 2006 before microprocessor technology and internet-backbone bandwith limitations have caught up with our over-enthusiastic ambitions.