Happy, Happy

The trip from Cali was a little crazy, including a 5 hours wait for the bus due to the drivers being lost in La Zona Cafertera... for 5 HOURS, hassles at the Ecuadorian border since we we 5 hours late and it was closed... though magically open if we paid a measley USD$15, yeah right, they eventually let us cross for free. It was a long trip, we didn't stop for food because we were so late, but I met a cool Colombia family and chatted with them.

I finally left Colombia on the last day of my 90 day visa and am in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. I've wandered around a little and it's an awesome city. I even had Indian food, as in from from India not indeginous, for lunch which was weird but cool. I kept looking for the deep friend banana and yuka but they managed to ellude me. I also took a peek at laptop prices and they look very reasonable, cheaper than Colombia or Argentina, so I think I'm going to buy one when I get back from the Galapagos Islands.

Speaking of which, I booked a flight to the islands for Thursday and am going to organise the dive cruise when I get there.

One strange thing happened during the bus trip. The further away I got from Colombia, the closer I got to Bogotá and by the time I got to Quito I was ready to spend the rest of the year there rather than Buenos Aires. My plans were foiled however when I spoke to Aura and found she's going to Buenos Aires for the rest of the year so... BA it is. The jacuzi, I mean apartment, I had my eye on isn't available so it's back to the drawing board on that front which is a hassle, but not a big deal.

To top things off, there were a string of XNA announcements today, the gist of which is that you'll be able to build games for the XBox 360 in C# and distribute them to other XNA users for the low low price of $99 per year, which is a lot cheaper than the $10,000 you normally need to pay for a dev kit and the $10+ million budget for a game these days. Yah! A "pro" version of XNA Studio comes out next year that lets you build "real" games which I'm equally excited about. Oh, XNA titles run on Windows as well, so porting pains should be a thing of the past and you anyone can run them. Actually, with the first release of XNA Studio Express (August 30) games will only run on WinXP, which is pretty good for free.

I was thinking about doing the rewrite of Elevation in C# and Managed DirectX, to get ready for XNA, but I think good ole C++ and DirectX is the best way to go for what I want to do with the game. I'm still debating whether I should use an existing framework like PopCap or Torque though. Ahh, decisions, decisions.

Chao,
p.