His explanation of the orthographic camera mode is a bit confusing though. I looked for a while trying to find a good explanation of how this camera mode works. Josh has two in his post, the first of which is a good top level explanation of what’s going on:

“The orthographic size expresses how many world units are contained in the top half of the camera projection. For example, if you set an orthographic size of 5, then the vertical extents of the viewport will contain exactly 10 units of world space. (The horizontal extents are dependent on the display aspect ratio.)”

Now for a concrete example of what he’s saying:

Here we have a camera set to orthographic perspective at 0, 0, -10 with no rotation and the orthographic size is set to 5. Therefore it is pointing down positive z, with (0, 0) at the center of the screen. Positive x goes right and positive y goes up the screen. Since the orthographic size is 5, it means you have 5 world units above and below the x-axis. If you are using a 1×1 quad, you will be able to fit 10 of them vertically from y = 4.5 to y = -4.5 (the quad is positioned by its center, so this would put the top of the top quad at y = 5 and the bottom of the bottom quad at y = -5.) If your aspect ratio is 4:3, you will be able to fit 10 * (4/3) or 13.33 of your 1×1 quads horizontally, from x = -6.133 to 6.133. As a side note – changing the aspect ratio of Unity’s Game mode to the same that you’re developing for is really useful and can be done with a drop down in the upper left when you’re in the Game mode. This will also change the aspect ratio of the camera’s preview window.

Now that you have the size figured out, you will want to decide how many pixels one world unit will be. For Unity you should be using textures that have height and width measurements that are a power of 2. Since you’ll be dividing by the height and width of your texture to get UV coordinates, your sprites should also be sized to powers of 2 to avoid floating point errors. In Josh’s post, he uses a ratio of 64 pixels to 1 world unit because he uses 64×64 pixel sprites. This means that his 64×64 pixel sprites map directly onto his 1×1 quad. If he had a sprite that was 128×64 pixels, he would scale his quad to be 2×1. This isn’t a Unity setting, it is just a convention that you will use when sizing your world objects to make sure your sprites will not be scaled or distorted.

Ben had already spent some time in Australia a couple years ago. Instead of showing him all of the cool things we’ve seen around Sydney, we decided to take a road trip after Christmas. Adrienne posted about our Christmas antics, but needless to say: we had a pretty amazing time. It’s been really great having some familiar faces around to share the holidays.

So. We set out from Sydney on the 26th in a car that Viive and Ian were kind enough to let us barrow, packed to the bursting point with food and camping gear that Viive and Ian were kind enough to let us borrow. Viive and Ian were really the sponsors of this trip. I’m not sure how to thank them enough. As should be expected, we really had no real plans outside of “towards Melbourne, then maybe to Adelaide if there’s time.”

An hour or so after we left Sydney, Adrienne found in one of the books that she and Ben had the foresight to rent the library the park where we spent the next three days. The park had some free campgrounds, lots of animals, and Australia’s Tallest Mountain, with a peak at 2,228 meters (7300 ft) – see if I hadn’t bolded it, it wouldn’t have seemed nearly as cool. On our first night there, we saw wild(!) kangaroos for the first time, about 15 meters from where we set up camp. It was so cool! Additionally, I had my first night’s sleep in a swag. These things are awesome. They are essentially fully enclosed mattresses. Ours had a zip off flap on the top, so we fell asleep looking up at the stars without having to worry about being eaten by mosquitoes or being kicked by a rogue ‘roo. Awesome!

We continued our path through the park, stopping at various points to get cave tours, and explore a couple caves all on our own. One was even unlit! Here we saw some small bats flitting around. On the way down from Australia’s Tallest Mountain we came across an echidna waddling its way across the path and up the rocky slope.

Most of the camping sites we stayed in were nothing more than some flattened land with an onsite toilet, so it was nice when we found ourselves in a campsite with working showers and hot water! Definitely the exception to the rule. That night became more interesting when we found out that we accidentally stole someone’s campsite: the sites marked “late arrivals – 1 night only” are apparently available to be booked online. The park ranger who directed us to the sites didn’t mention that. The people were very gracious though, and everything turned out fine.

We spent a couple days in Melbourne eating some good food, staying in a motel that was far nicer than any of us expected, and looking around some great museums. The Melbourne museum lives up to the quality of museum we’ve come to expect in our time in Sydney. Very cool museum that we didn’t even cover half of in our day there.

Next we headed a bit more south to see a rain forest that promised glow worms! We went out one night to the park where they are and walked one loop around the trail while it was still mostly light one in the dark. There are some really big trees here. After night fell, if you looked into the dirt walls near the trail, you’d find little pin-pricks of blue light spaced a few inches apart all over. Oh, and on the way to the park, we caught a glimpse of a swamp wallaby! I’ve been wanting to see a wild one for quite some time. Add two more really cool species to the list of animals we’ve seen in the wild here.

Then we decided to head home. 12 hours is a bit of an awkward amount of time to drive. Definitely doable in one day, but that is one really long day. We decided to take one brief hike in hopes seeing a cool orange fungus (we didn’t, but we did get to see more, really big trees) and then drive home. This is where everything fell apart. After about 10 hours on the road, our car decided it had had enough and we blew the head gasket in the engine. At 10PM. Luckily, we were near a small town that had motels and car repair shops. Unluckily, the only motel that has 24 hour check in was fully booked, so we slept in the car. It’s easy for something like this to ruin a trip in your memory, but all of the great wildlife that we saw really made it worth it. By the way, we also saw a really cute and fearless possum at a campsite that we had all to ourselves, and a koala on the side of the road watching the cars go by. Koalas are way more interesting in the wild than in a zoo. Especially when they sit at the side of the road watching traffic.

The female huntsman. Much larger body than the male, but a little shorter in the legs. A bit smaller overall.

They’re the large spider that everyone hears about from Australia. When I told people we were coming here, one of the things I heard was “that’s where all the big-spider-in-the-shower pictures come from!” I came here prepared to find one every other day. Then we didn’t. In fact, at first, the worst thing we had was a few moths. Then we got a few cockroaches (more on these later.) I relaxed. This made finding two back-to-back so much worse. In my opinion, the second, the female, was the creepier of the two. I helped a bit in the capture of the first, but Adrienne captured the second before I even knew it existed. We eventually set both free: creepiness is certainly not a death sentence. We kept the female overnight, and I figured maybe looking at it every now and then would acclimate me to it. Nope. Still really creepy, and I will definitely jump on the nearest high surface when we find another. Not that that will help much, they’re expert climbers.

And now an interesting note about cockroaches: Australian cockroaches are considered very beneficial. They stay in gardens and help fertilize and generally keep green areas healthy. The pest cockroaches that are here are all invaders. They’re mostly European, and vary widely in size. We’ve found tiny little ones, smaller than a dime, and ones larger than a half-dollar. The Australian ones aren’t fast and skittery. Apparently some people consider them good pets. The European ones are a pain to remove because they’re fast and squeeze under anything. However, we have found that stuffing a sweatshirt at the base of our door greatly reduces the number of bugs that make it inside. Hurray solutions!

Now, if you try to comment on a page, a little game will pop up before the comment goes through. That pop-up will ask you to do something like: “give the players their sporting equipment” or “feed the food to the baby.” Yes, it’s a little more time consuming for you, but it only takes a few seconds to play and it saves me from mounds of spam! In fact, here in Australia, it take longer for the game to load than for me to complete it.

I think this is a super cool way to filter humans from robots. And when robots can get around this, I’ll just be excited that we’ve created an AI that can complete this kind of cultural test!

A vine has crawled through the fence from the neighbors yard. It has these striking orange flowers.

Australia has quite a range of incredibly beautiful flowers. Some of them are strange, petal-less bulbs. Others have incredible coloration. Recently, one type of tree with brilliant purple flowers has started blooming. The flowers are so densely packed on theses trees that it almost looks like they have purple leaves. These trees provide excellent contrast when outlining other trees, and are striking when you come across a row of them lining a street. Many of the flowers here seem more vibrantly colored than the ones back home, and the patterns many of them have in their petals are very cool. Everywhere we look seems to have one sort of pretty or another for us to bask in. I guess its what we get for moving to a more tropical place!

This type of tree becomes covered in these cylindrical clusters of petal-less flowers.

My phone camera isn’t great for capturing this, but I love how the tree on the right provides nice purple accents to the rest of the trees. It’s a bit more clear if you blow the picture up.

The bird calls are much more interesting as well. There’s the Australian Raven, and the Kookaburra, and the Lyrebird, and just about everything in between. The Australian Raven has long low caws that sound like it could be a dying cat. While taking a run a few weeks ago I came across a flock of them loitering around a park, their white eyes are too far forward and they have these scraggly feathers on their neck. Truly, a bizarre and creepy bird. We heard Kookaburra more often out where Viive and Ian live. Their call really does sound as if they are laughing, and I can’t help but laugh along every time I hear them. Adrienne and I have taken to singing “Kookaburra lives in the old gum tree” in rounds when walking the dogs, wishing the Kookaburras to start up. Hopefully you watched the Lyrebird movie I linked to last time I talked about them. Adrienne and I actually got to see a male doing his dance the second time we went to the Blue Mountains! It was awesome! They can imitate so many sounds, and this one was doing a remarkable imitation of the stream it was standing near. Recently, a very strange bird call has been waking me up around 6. The closest thing I can relate it to is well oiled metal sheers. Obnoxious, yet intriguing. During the day, the birds are frequently noisy, their calls are so interesting, new, and different.

Many of the restaurants here allow patrons to bring in their own bottle of wine. It’s a pretty neat practice, and makes drinking in a restaurant actually affordable! They do charge a “corkage” fee per person, but this is usually only a couple dollars. We went to a restaurant last week on a LivingSocial deal without realizing that part of the deal was the corkage, so before our food arrived I quickly went out and got a bottle. Instead of paying 30, 40, or 50 dollars for a bottle of wine, we paid $12! Not only that, but if you plan ahead, you know you’ll be drinking a wine you like. You’re not restricted to what the restaurant carries. Do like.

There are a few little things that I can say I don’t enjoy much. First off, the internet here is really spotty. I don’t know if that’s purely because of the ISP, but we’ve had troubles everywhere we’ve tried to use it. It’s slow and frustrating. This is probably our biggest and most common gripe.

The street numbers here are also quite confusing. I haven’t been able to figure out what the pattern is yet, so if we’re looking for a particular address Google maps is a much better way to find it than by trying to find which way the numbers increase or decrease (the numbers may increase on one side, but decrease on the other.)

Yeee-Haw!

Ahh, a nice evening at home with the pets.

The bird and insect exhibit is a large balcony to the skeleton exhibit with taxidermied Australian birds in the wall cases and Australian insects in the display cases around the interior railing of the room. Adrienne spent the majority of her time here, taking pictures and reading about the birds and insects. They had some spiders spin webs in little boxes to put on display which was pretty cool.

The dinosaur exhibit is fairly up to date and had some nice skeletons. It also had this great series of information about different time periods (click these to read the information about the period):

The late Triassic, ~225 million years ago. This is the first time period that they showed. The Earth is mostly one giant continent.

The Earth during the middle Jurassic ~175 million years ago.

The continents start becoming what we know of them today around 125 million years ago in the early Cretaceous.

Around 75 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous, there were apparently large seas cutting down the middle of the Americas, Africa, and Russia. The mass extinction event that killed the Dinosaurs happens about 10 millions years later at the end of the Cretaceous period.

Ah, Big Blue as we know her now. Wait, what’s that? There are still Dinosaurs?! That’s right, we think that some of today’s birds evolved from Dinosaurs like T-Rex and Velociraptor.

So next time you’re out an about and see a bird, think about this:

Dinosaurs probably had feathers…

… so when will the birds turn on us?

And by the way, Australia used to have a giant wombat (my backpack is there for scale). It was probably very goofy looking (this is a possible reconstruction).

Adrienne found a really beautiful tree that had been cut and was laying over the riverbed.

The first trail we walked starts in a park near the train station and runs alongside a small river. Other than the river, the area felt pretty dry.  A lot of the vegetation was brown or leafless and there were places that had burned relatively recently. It was still quite beautiful, with some cool sandstone walls, pretty birds, and there are many waterfalls along the river’s path. I even got to see a snake slithering away after Adrienne walked passed its hiding spot.

The sandstone walls can form some pretty amazing sculptures.

You can see the trail here, the area felt very dry.

A waterfall about half way to the Wentworth Falls National Park area.

As we got into the Wentworth Falls area, the vegetation started to become more lush, the ground more damp, the humidity increased, and the waterfalls increased in size. And then we got to a lookout. Oh boy, was it stunning. I was frozen in place, staring out over an enormous valley, on top of a ~300 foot cliff. The valley is flanked by vibrantly colored sandstone walls, and headed by a giant waterfall, Wentworth Falls. We continued walking a path that took us along one of the walls of the valley, and every time I looked out over it, I was awestruck. The place is beautiful.

My first look over the valley. Wow.

Another view of the valley from a bit higher up.

This view was taken after we had walked to the right side of the other two pictures a bit, looking out to the left.

There is a path that walks across the top of Wentworth Falls. These waterfalls are are the top, facing away from the valley.

This is looking out over the valley, with the previous picture behind. The path had an amazing warning sign on it, see Adrienne’s post for that.

After continuing down the trail, we got a great view of Wentworth Falls.

This should give some perspective on how big the waterfall is.

One of the overhangs along the trail.

The path we continued on is called the Undercliff/Overcliff hike, part of the hike goes through a bunch of cave-like overhangs that have been created, presumably, by thousands of years of erosion from the water that runs down the walls from above and plant growth (complete conjecture on my part.) The hike also goes along the top of the cliff wall (Overcliff) and gives incredible views of the valley below. On the Overcliff part of the hike, we ran across a few birds. The first was two female superb lyrebirds, they have really big feet they used to dig up brush looking for food. If you’ve never heard of a lyrebird, go watch this video. As long as we stood still, they didn’t seem to mind us and went about their business. Look for Adrienne’s post about this trip to see pictures of them.

A crimson rosella sits near a hole in a tree.

The second was a pair of crimson rosellas. They were flitting around a hole in a tree that may have been their nest. Adrienne went into the bush to get some good pictures of them. What we saw of the Blue Mountains was amazing, and we’re going to go back to check out some other hikes later this week.

This is the view of our place from the front door. The door you can see in the back on the right is the bedroom door, and the bathroom is straight back.

The opposite side of the kitchen. The bedroom door is barely visible as the first one on the left, and the living room is the second on the left.

The bedroom, with Adrienne packing for a trip to the Blue Mountains (teaser).

And finally the living room. We’re currently using an inflatable mattress and an extra pad as our sofa. The new one will be arriving on Friday.

Yesterday afternoon we went to see the couch we ended up buying. It was at a place on the other side of town, the easiest way to get there was to take a ferry out of downtown. Before catching the ferry, we gave ourselves enough time that we could explore a little bit. We first went to the Opera house. It is much more beautiful up close than any of the pictures I ever saw conveyed. The roof is covered in differently textured tiles that give it a really awesome look. From a bit of a distance, I actually thought it was a mesh material, and as we got closer the tiles became more apparent. I also didn’t know that the opera house has three distinct buildings on its campus (for lack of a better word), and at least four auditoriums.

We found this really incredible restaurant down an alley that hung bird cages above its outdoor seating. Most were empty.

After the opera house, we continued exploring some of the downtown area. The mix of architecture here is pretty amazing. There is a really cool mixture of steel skyscrapers, five to six story beautifully mason-ed stone buildings, and two to three floor brick or wood house like buildings. I suppose most big cities are like this, there was just something a little more striking about the way it all sits together in Sydney than in other big cities I’ve been in. It seems that there is more contrast in Sydney, the big buildings and small buildings are interspersed throughout and right up next to each other. I’ve really enjoyed the small amount of exploration we’ve done and am looking forward to more.

Here are a couple of pictures of Luna Park from the other side of the harbor.

And during the day!

On the ferry ride we went past this beautiful point jutting out into the Harbor.

We took the ferry out of downtown, which is on the south side of the harbor, to one of the bays on the north side. It was a very pleasant ride with some spectacular views. The harbor coast is amazing, and has a lot of variety. There are the big houses and apartment buildings you would expect to see along a harbor and there are sandstone cliffs. One section reminded me strongly of the idyllic houses in San Francisco: tall, skinny, and squished all together. The harbor itself is also incredibly busy, with boats going all over the place all the time. I am surprised there aren’t more collisions.

After dinner, they took us to a beautiful park called Balls Head. It is on the north side of the Sydney harbor with a lot of wonderful trails through the bush. The trails are maintained, but not overly so making the park feel wild even though its in the heart of a large city. There are cliffs and caves and tide pools all carved out of the sandstone that the park sits atop. It makes for wonderful walks with excellent views. Enough talk! More Pictures!

Apparently there are all sorts of little caves throughout the park.

A view of the same overhang from the other side. The pillar is man-made, probably to keep it from collapsing.

And during certain times of year, you can have make fires in the park!

After the park, we went to a Coney Island-like midway/amusement park called Luna Park. I’ve never been to one, so it was pretty fun to see. Apparently it used to have two roller coasters, but then more residential buildings were built in the area and the residents complained too much. Ahh, the perks of being rich. Currently it has one roller coaster, a ferris wheel, a games midway, bumper cars, a big building labeled “Coney Island”, and some other attractions I can’t remember. Pretty cool place, and it’s along a really beautiful section of the harbor (seems to be a theme…) We didn’t take time to ride anything, but it was fun walking through and seeing it. The park has big brightly lit entrances, so you can’t really miss it, and is across the harbor from the Opera House. Since I was there, I couldn’t help but take a picture.

 I apologize for the layout of the pictures in the post. It’s really hard to get WordPress to do it the way I want it to.