The Trip 2013 - Guadalajara to Mexico City

Note: This is a condensed version of the pictures I took with some added narrative. The rest of the pics can be viewed in the album The Trip 2013 - Guadalajara to Mexico City. Each picture can be clicked to see a larger version and comment / like

Following on from the LA to Mazatlan, we began to head into mainland Mexico. The next stop on our journey was second largest city in Mexico Guadalajara. The first night there we hopped on the 'party bus' bound for the ever popular Mexican wrestling.



Im not usually one for WWE but I totally loved this. It could have had something to do with the incredible energy in the place or the extra large beers I was chugging, either way I totally loved every second of it. I joined in the chanting even though I had no idea what I was shouting at the people on the other side of the stadium.

At times I couldnt work out what to look at, what was going on in the ring or what was going on in the crowd. Talking about the ring, there were some really strange things going on in there. There were men dressed as Predator, there was a bloke mincing around grabbing the other competitors asses, there was a huge fat guy wearing fairy wings, there was a midget / child that was was thrown around the ring at the other competitors. Unfortunately I didnt take my camera so couldnt get any pictures to prove any of this so you will have to just take my word for it.

Of all the competitors my favourite (and incidently the only one I could catch the name of because the crowd kept chanting his name) was Mistico.



He was incredibly acrobatic jumping and flipping about all over the place. After the fight I felt that I just had to get a souvenir:



After the fight the energy levels were high, we drove around in the party bus dancing and drinking while DJ Fantashtic (not his real name) spun out the marimba tunes



The next day we hopped on a bus bound for Tequila (the place not the drinl). We took a tour around a distillery and learnt how the drink goes from the heart of the Agave plant..



.. gets fermented...



.. then distilled into pure Tequila



After the tour we had a little tasting session and learnt about the different types of Tequila. Tequila Blanco comes straight from the distillery, gets watered down a little to bring it in the 38-40% range and sold. This stuff tastes most like the Agave plant and has a very strong pure taste to it.

The usual stuff you see in England is the gold Tequila that just the white Tequila but aged in oak casks for a number of years. The longer you age it the softer tasting Tequila you get as the drink absorbs colours and flavours from the oak. I personally preferred the softer aged stuff much more.



On the way back to the hostel we stopped off in an Agave field for a group photo, these plants were much bigger and sharper than I expected, particularly when they are digging into your back:



That evening a few of us took a trip to downtown Guadalajara.



Many of the buildings have a very European / French feel to them, this apparently is largely due to the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz in the late 1800's who had a thing for everything French.

We also met up with Suzanne's (our trek leader) friend Nerio..



.. who was kind enough to donate me his Mistico keyring ..



.. which is now attached to my backpack :)

The following day we found ourselfs in the incredibly picturesque town of Guanajato. Set onto the side of a hill with small streets winding chaotically between colourful buildings you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Italy or the south of France.



While there we soaked up the atmosphere around the central Plaza or Zocaro..



.. ate some great food ..



.. and drank some cold beers



In the evening we went on a tour around the city with a traditional band / theatre company. At the start they gave us small pewter containers that we had no clue to their purpose until near the end when they were filled with orange juice and we were told to long-arm them into our mouth as part of a ceremony.



Kelsie and I decided to wake up a little earlier the next morning and go and try to get some good photos from the hillside of the beautiful city. Im glad we made the effort as the view was spectacular:







Our final stop before Mexico city was a small colonial town called San Miguel. This place was like a lesser version of Guanajuato, a beautiful central plaza and colourful buildings but not quite meeting up to the same level as the previous destination.



It did have some nice bars however in particular there was one on the top of a building near the plaza that had a braizier, good cocktails and house music, definitely my cup of tea



The final destination for this part of our journey was the capital of Mexico, Mexico City. Here we said goodbye to two members of our group Madeline and Colette..



.. and said hello to two new members Simon and Emma.

While there I had one of the best sandwiches I have ever had



It was called the Milanesa Torta and was stuffed with crumbley beef that just melted in your mouth. Throw a few pickels, jalepenos and mustard on the top and it didnt last long. Infact it was so good we went back and had it again the next day.



Before leaving for this trip I read a few lists of things that you should definitely take with you. One of those things was duct-tape. I was a little dubious at first but im glad I took it as it has come in handy from repairing sandals to securing loose plugs:



While there we visited some of the Aztec ruins right in the centre of the city.





The last evening of Mexico city we decided to go shopping in the biggest shopping mall in the city. After shopping we grabbed some food in TGI's in the mall, all was going well until disaster strook



A few weeks before leaving for this trip Kelsie had had a bad allergic reaction to something she ate. She was rushed to the hospital, the doctors had to induce a coma so they could get oxygen into her. She almost died as a result. They did a whole battery of tests but couldnt work out what had caused the reaction. The best idea was it was a sudden rection to the fish in the fish and chips she had eaten. She decided that rather than cancel her whole trip she was going to continue on but avoid any fish.

All was going well until she had a chicken salad in TGI's (no fish) when the alergic reaction struck again. This time she was carrying an epi-pen with her so immediately jabbed it in her thigh before legging it into the nearest taxi and we motored at top speed to the hospital. Fortunately this time either the reaction wasnt as strong or the epi-pen lessened the effects but she made it to the hospital still able to breathe.



It was and still is seriously scary though as we have no idea what could have triggered it this time, perhaps the salad dressing? She has bravely decided to continue on with the trip but is being very careful about what she eats. Rice and beans seems to be safe so far.

An interesting end to the first 14 days in Mexico. I have experienced so much already, I cant believe I have another 6 months to go!

Picking and Bounding Boxes

Got the next essential small step of the project in today, picking, that is selecting an object that exists within a 3D world from a mouse click in the 2D world. Found some really good resources for this including the Hazy Mind site again and a new one I discovered by accident by Charles Humphrey. I had a little trouble at first with working out how to calculate a bounding box, but yet again the XNA community came to my rescue. Thanks to Andy and his blog I now have a custom content pipeline that generates a bounding box for my mesh automatically.

Now that you can select a unit on the map the next step will be to add the ability to add properties and *gulp* custom scripts!

Unit Placement

I have to be honest I haven't been working as hard as I could have recently on the TD project. The reason for this is that I have been trying to decide whether to progress with it atall. I believe it is an awesome project and will be successful, however each time I complete something in the project it adds to the complexity never subtracting from the amount of work remaining.

I finally however decided that I would stick it out as my mantra goes "Your success is only measured by your accomplishments". If I constantly keep starting new projects then I will never accomplish anything and therefore never be successful.

I had a long chat with my new friend Ebor Jan Folkertsma about different technical challenges associated with developing a tool and a game engine in tandem. The chat was extremely useful in the fact that it allowed me to take a more objective view of the project and split it down into simple tasks rather than getting swamped by the enormity of the project. It also made me feel like I wasn't sailing into uncharted waters, there were others out there that had run into similar problems and had come up with solutions to solve it. Basically Ebor gave me a big morale boost which encouraged me to stick with this project.

So onto the progress. Well as I said not a whole lot of visible progress has been made, I have mostly been re-organising the core of the project again to best suit my needs. I have however been adding more functionality allowing the user to place objects on the level in preparation for setting triggers and the like later down the road.



Next step in the project is picking so that the new objects on the map can be selected and have their properties modified and triggers added and the such :)

TD Terrains

Well i havent updated in a while one the TD project, not because I wasnt working on anything but mainly because i have been struggling with the nuts and bolts of 3D RTS game development.

Normal game development is fine when you only expect ever to have your game to simply run. When you want to make it run as a game but also act as a tool at the same time you have problems. The way the TD project is structured we have a game "Engine" project that contains all the code to display our objects on the screen, then we have a "Tool" project that contains all the code for making maps, it creates an instance of the Engine so that it can render those objects. We also have a "Game" project that will be the actual game and will contain all the other game type logic like menu systems etc.

Getting all these to work nice and happily and in an efficient way is proving to be umm difficult. The problem is confounded by the fact that the tool requires multiple rendering windows to display things at once, causing me to redesign alot of the way the game works. When you only have one window open you can set classes to be static all over the place, but if you need those classes to interact in a non static way then you have to use managers to sort out how they should interact, introducing more complexity nightmares!

But anyways, enough of that. Time for pretty pictures:



As you can see Mr Graham 'Golden' Furner has been making good progress on his terrain generation algorithm for the project. Hopefully I will beable to get enough of the structure in place so we can begin to merge the two parts of the project together!

Docking Nightmares

The tool has to be functional, elegant and fun. For that I wanted a special UI for it. I loved what the team had done over at Blade3D and i wanted something similar. Unfortunately they paid at least $300 for thiers, and hence this wasnt realy an option for me just yet :P

So for now im stuck with an old 2005 style UI. To spice it up abit I decided to add docking panels. I had worked with docking panels before for my ChainReaction project in Java but hadnt done one in C# before. A quick search on sourceforge came up with DockPanel Suite.

It certainly wasn't as easy to pick up as when I did docking panels in Java, but I eventually got it. The toughest part which I still haven't sorted out 100% is rendering a XNA window into a docking panel. As XNA runs using a DirectX graphics device its very picky about loosing its rendering state. So if a user undocks the window and moves it about and then redocks it, it doesnt like it due to the loss of rendering state. For now the XNA window has been fixed so that it cant be undocked.

As you can see in the screenshot above I have added some visual properties to the BlueprintEditor so that you can affect how its rendered, its all working beautifully.

The next step is to get the blueprints being placed on the grid so that you can build the level.

TDProject BlueprintStore and BlueprintEditor

Today I added the BlueprintStore and the BlueprintEditor.

Firstly the BlueprintStore has two halfs to it. On the left hand side you have a list of "library blueprints" these are loaded from an XML document. Library blueprints can then be dragged over to the second half which is where all the blueprints that are used in the map are stored.

If you select a blueprint you can then click a button to open the BlueprintEditor. The editor is a separate window with a rotating view of the current model for the blueprint and on the right is a property grid that lets the user edit any number of properties a blueprint has.

So you can see that when a user creates a map they are going to require blueprints. Blueprints can be anything from creeps, towers, trees, houses, anything. Blueprints are the actual objects that that you place in the world and interact with.

Tomorrow will be more work on the blueprint editor me thinks :D

Mike

TowerDefence - A Slow Beginning

Just a quick update on the project, not much to show as of yet. Been working on getting a basic terrain in place with 3D picking so you can place towers on the map.

I realised once I had done this however I was jumping the gun abit, so the next bit im going to be working on is the BlueprintStore. The BlueprintStore lets you create tower blueprints that the player can then use in the game. There will also be a library of pre-built towers that you can just drag and drop and use.

New project started! TowerDefence

I always need something to be working on in my free time. All this year it has been my University projects that have been keeping me busy. But now all i have left is one exam I have been seeking a new project that I can undertake.

I was looking for a specific kind of project. It had to be something that I am passionate about (i work so much better when i enjoy the project). It preferably had to have something to do with tools and it had to have enough new things in it that I had never done before so that I could learn new stuff.

With that said it took alot of head scratching and many weeks passed. I watched many videos of up and coming games and watched several videos related to new PS3 games and in particular "little big planet". This is exactly the type of project I wanted to work on, its a tool but its a game at the same time. If you havent seen it then you can check it here. Basically all the content in the world is created in an interactive fun tool by the community which then gets uploaded and others can play.

I asked myself how can I take the idea of little big planet and game 3.0 and apply it to a project I want to do? Well it dawned on me while i was playing a Tower Defence (TD) on Warcraft 3, I can make this!

For those of you that dont know, TD's are mini games that happened by accident. When Blizzard released Warcraft 3 they also released their powerful map editor with it, soon the community were making their own maps and campaigns. Soon people started to notice other features of the map editor like the ability to link triggers together. Duke Wintermaull invented the first TD (i think), basically you and 7 other people have to stop waves of monsters that spawn at the top of the map from getting to the bottom of the map by placing defencive fortifications along the way. As you kill more monsters you get more gold so you can build more defences, simple concept but HIGHLY addictive :D

Soon there were hundreds then thousands of these different "mini-games" some were TD's others were completely different. Hundreds of thousands play these custom games every day even now some 5 years after its release.

So after all that, the new project! Well infact its not a new project at all, its taking the TD idea and expanding, elaborating and improving on it. Users will be given a friendly editor that they can use on thier Windows machine to build the levels in an easy, interactive and fun way. The levels can then be saved and exported out for use on the X-Box and PC.  Levels will be given high scores and multiplayer abilities (eventually) encouraging others to replay the levels to get better scores to become the "pro" at a certain TD.

Well thats the basics of the idea, I have a great many more ideas of ways to improve the way TDs work. But I will detail these in the weeks to come.

So the project has now started, I have enlisted the help of my flatmate and course mate Graham 'Golden' Furner for his specialisation in terrains. Expect to see some excellent work from him in the coming weeks.

I have been working on getting an engine up and working and the basics of the tool ready for furthur development. So far there isnt a whole lot to see, I have been working through Michael Schuld's exellent tutorials on 3D XNA games engines. And have now got a basic 3D engine up and running although it doesnt look much like a tool yet, but expect more very soon!