For those interested in my latest column on Starship Sofa, here's a few quick links to help out:

For instance, in my career as a web developer:

This might seem like a small thing, but it makes it that much nicer a tool to use, and it's a level of attention-to-detail that bodes well for the rest of the tool. Bravo, guys. :)

For those following my Starship Sofa column, or just interested in information about Startopia, try these links:

Including my favourite: "Ask those aliens if they've crashed into the New Mexico desert lately. I dare you."

Our music is by Cheapshot, from the album Streets of Bass, used with permission.

The editor now does all the basic stuff - add and remove tiles with rotation, and everything built with an eye towards touch interfaces. (The camera rotation trigger is currently mapped to middle-click, so I've screwed myself on my work Mac, but anyway...)

Last night I serialised a level to XML for the first time - with a few additions in the UI I should be able to added saving and loading to the interface. Then, all that's left is to make it into a game - splash screen, start and finish markers, winning/losing conditions - the last 90%, in other words. :)

Most important change is the projector shadow - thanks to Terry Paton for the tip on using Projectors in Unity to make easy shadows.

Also included is my amateurish 3D modelling, hot out of Blender. (People, myself included, love to pick on Blender's UI... Props to those guys, though - we'd be poorer without it, and it keeps getting better.) 

I've cleaned up some debug, experimented with more lights, and I'm firming up a lot of ideas in my head about level building and sharing.

Valuable lessons learned:

1. My previous clumsy hacks on camera control need to be rewritten - and as is usually the case, the solution was elegantly simple. (I simply move the camera to the ball and then pull back by the desired distance; rotating the camera in response to mouse actions is simple - the only tricky part was picking World rotation for rotation around the 'up' vector, and local rotation for rotation around the 'right' vector, to give a natural orientation.)

2. Adding a damping force made falling look dumb, and surface friction doesn't make any difference to rolling speed - what I needed to tweak to stop it rolling (realistically, but annoyingly) out of control was drag - both the regular and angular kinds.

3. Simple is usually best. For example, the ball moves by apply a force in a direction - the direction is a vector based on the 'forward' direction of the camera. Players don't expect to be pushing 'away' from the camera, though - they expect 'forward' across the terrain (which depending on how steeply down the player is looking, might be a two very different things). So I need to split the camera's forward vector into its vertical and horizontal components - hmm, do I do a Vector3.Project, or something? Simplest solution is to just zero out the 'y' component of the camera vector and renormalise - super simple.

4, Gizmos - super useful. I have a gizmo pointing out of the ball in the direction of force, which makes debugging a heap easier.

I've added some debugging while exploring a Chrome+OSX+WebPlayer bug - turns out to be a known issue regarding that combination.

I've also added cheesy translucency so that terrain doesn't block visibility - I learned a heap about Z ordering, Unity's transparent textures and created my first shader to get this in place - all valuable lessons.