Brand new year, brand new look.
The web site received a bit of a facelift, but it’s nothing compared to what went down under the hood.
I’ve finally set up a proper back-end for PayPal purchases, with automatic notifications, database-stored information, secure encrypted download links and statistics tracking. I had to learn both PHP and SQL, how the two work, how to set them up and how to mix them together, but managed to tackle everything within the span of a day with enough time leftover to completely reskin the website (which was not nearly as straightforward as I would have liked)… and it was New Year’s Eve to boot. Fortunately my family (and my awesome GF!) didn’t mind me bringing my laptop along to our family gathering.
In other news, I’ve released the 1.20 update to NGUI, adding support for normal and tangent generation for UI meshes, letting the developer make use of lit, bumped, reflective, and other complex shaders, which expands the potential of the UI package tenfold. I myself was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to create a window that had a refractive see-through background and actual glowing buttons that illuminated not only the window they resided on, but nearby objects as well. Going forward I’ll continue expanding it with examples, possibly even looking into how I can integrate NGUI better with something like uScript.
On another curious note, NGUI has been available for 3 weeks now and it’s already #8 top package on the Unity Asset Store even though it sold just as many copies via PayPal as it did via UAS. Talk about positive motivation to keep going!