I’t looks like the Crysis demo has been pushed back, originally it was going to be released on Halo 3 day, but looking this morning for any info on the demo I found this in the EA Forums.

I’m waiting for this game, looks like it will hit stores November 16th, 2007.

Check out my previous post about Crysis vs Reality

Hey there-

Sorry for the lack of clarity on this announcement. I can officially confirm that the SP Demo date has been pushed back. I can say with confidence that this decision was made in the best interest of the game as well as your enjoyment of it. There’s also some good news–please see the announcement below, along with a message from Cevat Yerli for the details.

-Jynx

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CRYSIS SINGLE PLAYER DEMO MOVES TO OCTOBER 26, 2007

EA and Crytek are announcing today that the single player demo for Crysis is moving to October 26, 2007. The demo will also be released with Crytek’s CryEngine 2 – Sandbox 2 game editor, giving the community a great amount of hands on time with the powerful mod tools coming with Crysis before the November 16th release date.

Please see Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli’s note to the community for more details.
___________________________________ ____________________________

< br/>Hi everyone,

We have some news to announce.

First, I am sorry for the bad news – the Crysis single player demo will now be available everywhere on October 26th, 2007.

We are taking some extra time to make sure you that you have an amazing experience but also we did not want to risk the release date of Crysis at this stage. To get the game into your hands by November the 16th, we had to make this call.

Now the good news – the big surprise. The SP demo will be released with our CryEngine 2 – Sandbox 2 game editor, giving the community the opportunity to get familiar with the vast amount of tools they will have at their disposal four weeks before we ship, something we have always wanted to do.

This is an exciting time for us at the studio as the development of Crysis comes to an end and we are only a few weeks from Gold Master. We appreciate your patience and are looking forward to getting Crysis into your hands on November 16th.

Thanks,

Cevat Yerli
CEO of Crytek

Saline Warm Springs

A week or so ago, we went on a trip to Death Valley, yes you read this right. In the midst of the summer with 122 degree weather during the day and prob 90-100 at night. The first day was a drive down from the San Francisco Bay area though some various small towns stopping on the way at Happy Burger in Mariposa. I have to say by that time I we where all pretty hungry and well lets just say Happy Burger made our stomachs very happy After Mariposa we headed though to Yosemite National Park, took some candid tourist shots and headed to our hotel in Bishop, CA for a good nights rest before heading into Death Valley (Saline Valley). The next day we headed into the desert, 2 jeeps and one truck with 15 gallons of water and more of gas. Our first stop was at some random location to check out these odd looking tree’s which my friend quickly pointed out they where Joshua tree’s.

Ok enough of these tree’s onto our next stop Eureka Dunes which is quite an oddity to see in this area of the world. Its almost like the Sahara desert but in the middle of Saline Valley. A big sand dune was created over thousands and thousands of years in this middle of this valley.

After what seems like thousands of miles driving in the warm 122 Fahrenheit weather, we came across this oddity the Saline Warm Springs which is pictured above. After stepping into this hot tub and realizing it was cooler in the hot tub than outside we decided to make this our camping spot for the rest of the day and the evening…. Did we ever make it out of Death Valley? Tune in next time to see what happens to 5 guys, 2 jeeps and one truck.

Greedo didn’t shoot first

I ran into Greedo this weekend and we had a little chat about who fired first in Star Wars. It seems that Han is a bit fat liar and made George (the man behind the curtain – think wiz of oz) change history.

Greedo feels like he has a bad rap now and can’t seem to get any jobs else were after Star Wars revised edition went out. So as you can see now he has a job in Sci-Fi museum, where he spends the rest of his life encased in glass.

Poor guy, gets a bad wrap and not cant get any decent jobs. You can visit him at the Seattle Sci-Fi Museum. Feel free to read more about this conspiracy here.

I have been on the long quest for a great gps logger to carry around on my hikes and travels. I am a shutter bug by nature and on my last trip to Europe Took over 700+ photos and I would of taken more but my 8 gig memory card took a dive 2 day into the trip. Over the past 6 months I have tried out my combination of hardware and software solutions (original post) before finally buying a GiSTEQ logger to take on my trip to Europe with me. I originally saw a link on Engadget a few days before my trip and quickly contacted the company and ordered one.

My experiences with the GiSTEQ device was pretty positive over all but I did find one annoying factor and that was the time it takes to sync up with satellites and start logging data. Every day of our trip, I had to stand outside for what seemed like a few minutes for it to finally sync up, some times this was faster and im sure it was the various locations I was standing at that didn’t help. This is probably due to a lot of the tourist places are in locations where a lot of buildings tower over you. Now I don’t know that much about satellites but I’m guessing that was one of the issues.

The software that comes with the logger is still what I call it in the early stages, while it works most of the time it lacks a lot of the features that I use (Google earth/maps exporter). I have been in contact with them and they assure me they are working on versions to add some of the features that I use and as of the June 7th a new version is out but I haven’t had time to check it out yet.

Never fret though, You can export your gps logs to .nmea format and use software such as RoboGeo to take advantage of more features for geo tagging your photos such as export to Google Earth/Maps, Shape file, DXF file, Mapoint and many other options.

Their is a new gps logger in town I’m trying to get my hands on as well QSTARZ BT-Q1000 GPS which incorporates also bluetooth technology. The GiSTEQ is just a logger but the QSTARZ is both a logger and can be used with other mapping software for trip/route planning.

Over all i pretty happy with the GiSTEQ and as they improve the software I might use it more and more, but for $99 you cant beat the combo of hardware and software that comes at that price.

Seattle Skyline

Last weekend I took a quick unexpected trip to Seattle to visit some friends and do a surprise visit to my biz partners. This was my second trip to Seattle and I do have to say I really like the area how ever I don’t think I could deal with the weather so much. Out of the 4 days I was there the sun only came out for 2 and boy it was like a celebration for everyone.

I guess living in sunny California we take the nice sun for granted, when the sun comes out in Seattle its as some miracle has happened. While on my visit I was able to swing by Valve Software, take a small tour and play test a bit of Team Fortress 2 which I had a blast playing.

I’m headed back up that way at the end of June so if anyone has any recommendations of things to check out, bars to visit, hidden Seattle gems or anything else hit me up or leave a comment in the blog.

This photo was taken from my buddies balcony during one of those rare sunny days in Seattle.

Lair fan boys get ready to drive down to Sunnyvale, CA on June 2. Factor 5 in conjunction with Cogswell Polytechnical College will be showing off concept art from the PS3 video game Lair which is due out any time now. Members from Factor 5 will be presenting concept art and also talk about the making of Lair. It all kicks off on June 2, starting at 12:30 at the Open House.

Current Schedule:

• Cogswell Open House 12:30 – 3:00 – Learn about degree Programs at Cogswell
• Forum with Factor 5 3:00 – 4:30 – Making of Lair
• Gallery Reception 4:30 – 6:30 – Look behind the scenes at the artwork from Lair

The exhibit will continue from June 2 till July 27 at Cogswell but if you want to hear members from Factor 5 talk about the making I suggest you head down June 2nd. I know most of these guys personally and this is something not to be missed, especially if your looking for a career in videos games.

One of my buddies Pat’s work will be shown at this exhibit so stop by his blog and give him a shout here.

Hungarian Parliament Building
Originally uploaded by Gate-Way.

While looking though my trip photos (all 700 of them) I came upon this one that actually turned out really nice giving the circumstances of light, distance and lack of a tripod. This is the Parliament Building in Budapest and we are standing across the Danube river in the Buda Castle district. Here is a snippet from wiki about this building.

“The Hungarian Parliament Building (Hungarian: Országház) is the seat of the National Assembly of Hungary, one of the world’s greatest legislative buildings, a notable landmark of Hungary and a popular tourist destination of Budapest. It lies in Kossuth Lajos Square, right on the bank of the Danube, at Budapest”

I was surprised as to how this photo came out and most of the night photos of buildings usually turned out blury but I remembered a trick to do when you don’t have a tripod handy.

Most point and shoot cameras have a timer function which counts down a number of seconds and takes the photo. So finding a good stable place to set my camera i used the 10 second function, which as you can tell worked out nicely. Just a friendly photography trick to keep in mind.

If your ever in the city Budapest and you have the itch to drive a tank I have just the thing for you. While in Budapest a week ago I saw a flyer at a local internet cafe that had printed on it “Drive a Tank” of course this caught my attention and I had to find out more.

Here is a quote from their website:

“”Rushing off the road, I have the steering in my hands. Under me, a 22 ton monster of steel roars. I’m in control, nothing can stand in my way! It is only the two of us: man and machine.”

Have you ever wondered, how it feels to experience such a magnificent ride?”

It seems from the web site they have three types of tanks you can try out:

1. GSzP-055 – “Táltos”
2. ZSU-23-4 – “Shilka”
3. T-55 ARV – Technical rescuer vehicle

Unfortunately we didn’t have the opportunity to do this and its a bit of a drive out of Budapest but If anyone does this let me know im sure the next time I make it to Budapest im going to give it a shot or better yet shoot it with my tank

Below are pics I scanned in from the small flyer I picked up.

This is one of the 700+ photos I took, I haven’t had a chance to sort though most of them but I liked this door in Prague, it Belongs to the Týn Church. I swear Ill post a bunch of photos soon, its so hard to find my favorites. I just quickly posted this to flickr to get at least one photo up Here is a link to the wiki about this Church and believe me I have plenty of photos that will be coming soon.

I’m nearly recovered from my trip to Europe and hopefully will have some time in the next week or so to post some photos but I wanted to write about an experience we had in Prague with Absinthe and the dangers that can happen if not done right. We decided to do one of those pub crawl tours which takes you around to a few various pubs and explains the history of Prague and the beer. At the end of one such tour and probably 6-7 beers into our adventure my travel partner wanted to try out Absinthe.

“Absinthe or the Green Fairy as many call it is a is a distilled, highly alcoholic, anise-flavored spirit derived from herbs including the flowers and leaves of the medicinal plant Artemisia absinthium, also called grand wormwood. Although it is sometimes mistakenly called a liqueur, absinthe is not bottled with added sugar and is, therefore, classified as a liquor or spirit.”

This drink is prepared in a special way (my guess is cause it tastes like crap with out it) where you use a spoon, sugar, some water and fire. Now this seems like a good idea and everyone loves to play with fire but add an additional 6-7 beers before hand and things can get out of control quickly which happened in our case. (their seems to be many ways to prepare Absinthe)

My travel partner (I wont mention names) asked the bartender to work his magic and prepare this drink for him, unfortunately he didn’t speak any English so our young tour guide did a bit of translation as to what he was doing. From what I remember he put some sugar on the spoon, poured some absinthe on the spoon, lit the sugar on the spoon to allow it to caramelized and then dumped the sugar into the glass which lit the whole glass ablaze. The tour guide said something to the effect of drink or blow, I don’t remember now, it happened so fast and my buddy tried to drink the whole glass of Absinthe while it was still on fire and spilling a bit on his face. As you can imagine the group gasped in horror as we saw my buddy face go up in flames.

Here is a quote from my buddy on what happened:

“The actual confusion was that he mimed blowing out the glass, but it looked like taking a drink, so I said “chug it?” and he said “yes, chug it”, thinking that chug meant blow out or something. My fault for using vernacular.”

After what seemed to be like 10 seconds someone finally patted his face down putting out the fire, and the looks of horror and amazement where plastered on the groups faces. After checking with my buddy to make sure he was all right, we all burst into laughter but still a bit socked as to what just happened. I guess the tour guide didn’t really translate that he needs to blow out the glass before he takes the drink. I guess this is common sense to anyone who hasn’t been already drinking or thought that this was the way to do it. So this is just a word of warning to all wanting to do Absinthe blow out the freaking fire before taking a sip

My buddy is all fine, he had a nice case of 2nd degree burns on one side of his face and is healing fine, poor guy. He still claims that he could of drank the whole thing while it was on fire, I guess we will never know unless we head back to Prague some time soon.