I’ve made a good chunk of progress on a few things this week, starting with the VIP Lounge floor area. I’ve been trying out various things in an effort to come up with a sensible layout, but I keep coming back to the notion of having the seating raised slightly from the rest of the room. This is where I’m at with it so far, along with some custom chairs that also need more work 
The stairs also now have lights, and I’m going to try and fit a few more seats around the front. Right now this gives us 16 seats in addition to maybe 4 more, which is technically enough to cover the command staff, but it doesn’t feel like it’s making the best use of the space. The room is quite an inefficient shape anyway, so it’s always going to be a challenge to make the best of it. I’m also going to try swapping out some single chairs for more permanent built-in sofas. It’s not clicking yet… I need to fiddle with it some more.
While I was doing that I noticed the props looked a bit floaty/unnatural when not casting shadows, so I built a new system for casting a blob shadow underneath them. It fades with distance and maintains orientation without any ticking or runtime code needed, which admittedly kept me up all night, but I got there in the end 
Not being content with simply adding shadows, however, I also added some randomisation for organic items like fruit. When created they pick a random scale within some predefined boundaries, which really helps make them look a bit more natural. The shadow also scales with this gracefully, because this whole system turned into a personal mission and I wasn’t going to let it beat me 
And then finally today I’ve been working on the ship’s door panels because it occurred to me that in all this time I’ve never actually added any. I was quite proud of the door panel system I built for the Orville all those years ago, and I really wanted to take that concept further of having the door panel be a computing device in its own right.
They’re not terribly large, being about the size of an original iPad. 15cm x 18.75cm or thereabouts:
But I wanted to cram a lot of functionality into such a tiny form factor, so I’ve built a tabbed interface that will allow me to add or remove additional functionality depending on what type of door it is, etc;
Right now you can instruct the door to open automatically or manually, with open and close buttons for that purpose. There’s also a bell button which doesn’t do anything yet (we need to find a nice sound for it), and the tabbed interface lets you access other functions such as a security keypad for locking/unlocking the door with a code, and on this particular door some privacy controls that make the glass go frosted;
My next job is linking the inner and outer panels together and also adding the multiplayer functionality while I’m at it.
It’s not super pretty to look at yet, but I’m content with it for version 1.0 