Reading Material: Dream City
Submitted by John on Mon, 11/28/2011 - 09:44
An interesting new column by Will Doig on Salon.com entitled Dream City begins with an article about trends in urban renewal and the motivating forces behind them. Well worth a read at the link below.
How should we design the cities of our dreams? by Will Doig, via Salon.
Sim City 5 Rumors Afoot (Again)
Submitted by John on Wed, 08/31/2011 - 09:07
In a couple of news posts over at Simtropolis recently, the old spectre of Sim City 5 seems to have reared its head yet again. Most interestingly, statements from a former executive at EA seem to indicate that they are considering resurrecting some "old franchises". Whether that includes Sim City or not is anyone's guess.
Movin' On Up
Submitted by John on Sun, 08/07/2011 - 06:04
A rather significant change is afoot here at the Metropolis Project: I (and thus the project) am making a move from Tokyo to the U.S. of A. Although the decision to move wasn't based on the recent events here (this has actually been in the offing for quite some time,) it will certainly be a relief not to worry about things like radiation and power shortages. (Of course, the U.S. is appears to be having it's own meltdown, just one of an economic nature.) Regrettably this will mean a bit less free time to work on the project in the short term, but for the future I think it's a positive step. In the meantime, progress continues on the new and improved website, and I'll try to make time for the odd article when I can!
Reading Material: The 6 Most Ominous Trends In Video Games
Submitted by John on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 12:12
I read a good piece by David Wong on Cracked the other day (contrary to what you might expect, they have a lot of really good articles) about recent worrying trends in the video game industry. Two parts of the article in particular struck me as particularly relevant to what we're doing here. First, he talks about how a combination of increased piracy and rising development costs are driving companies towards ever-more-restrictive DRM and a "software as a service" model, in which one-time purchases of games are replaced with a subscription and/or microtransaction-based approach. Second, he points to the growing lack of innovative titles as studios concentrate on "safe" genres and themes to protect their return on the increasingly large budgets needed for top-tier games.
Reading Material: The Infinite Version
Submitted by John on Thu, 05/26/2011 - 14:52
Read a great post this week by Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror (incidentally a really entertaining blog, even if you're not interested in programming) about version numbers and their growing irrelevance. He holds up Google Chrome (which happens to be my browser of choice) as a prime example of this: while most programs are defined by version number, like Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 3, Chrome has essentially abandoned major releases in favor of gradual, minute improvements, which are pushed out in the background via auto-update. As Jeff puts it:
…as a regular user of Chrome, I no longer think of myself as using a specific version of Chrome, I just … use Chrome.
This is exactly the paradigm I'm hoping we can achieve with Metropolis; Although clearly this is tricky in the face of a large amount of user-created content, Chrome demonstrates pretty well that even something with many independent extensions can do it. In any case the post is well worth a read, check it out here.
In other news, continuing apologies for the long hiatus, regular updates will hopefully be resuming soon!
Close to Home
Submitted by John on Tue, 03/22/2011 - 10:43
As some of you might know, I live in Tokyo, Japan. Needless to say, it's been a very tense week and a half here, and while things are showing signs of getting back to normal, video games have not exactly been at the forefront of my mind recently. I hope you'll bear with me for a bit until the situation is a little more stable.
I do have to say, though, that if we end up including Sim City-style "meltdown" and "earthquake" disasters in Metropolis, I don't think I'll ever be able to press that button, simulation or no.
Cities In Motion Released
Submitted by John on Sat, 02/26/2011 - 21:39
Paradox Interactive released a new game yesterday called Cities In Motion. While not a city builder per se, the game looks like something that would appeal to city sim fans. Gameplay is apparently centered around constructing transport networks in historical cities. I'm a big fan of Paradox's games, so I'll definitely be checking it out!
Infrastructure
Submitted by John on Mon, 01/31/2011 - 14:54
With at least a rudimentary charter now in place, I'm going to be concentrating next on upgrading the website infrastructure. There are two major things to get accomplished:
- The voting framework needs to be set up and tweaked to reflect the voting systems we've decided on.
- The membership system needs to be overhauled; Especially, I need to figure out how to store payment details and then confer higher membership privileges based on that.
The voting system shouldn't be too hard to implement, but the membership part is a little more complicated; Specifically, since I don't really have the means to store credit card information securely yet, I'll have to set up an interface with a payment gateway that can keep people's details safely. Apart from that, though, we should have at least feature voting up before too long.
Also, the timing of these upgrades coincides with the latest release of the CMS I'm using (Drupal 7), so I'll probably take the opportunity to upgrade that as well, and roll all the changes out as one major overhaul. Hopefully should have something ready in the next couple of months. In the meantime the update schedule for articles might be a little erratic, so please bear with me!
Full Draft of Charter Now Up
Submitted by John on Tue, 01/18/2011 - 13:34
I've consolidated the three parts of the draft charter and uploaded them to a permanent page on the site, which you can find here, or through the "Charter" link at the bottom of the page. There's still more to cover organization-wise, and some of what's been outlined will probably end up changing along the line (as an obvious example, the poll on voting methods is still open); But, I think the basic framework is sound, or at least enough so to start developing the site's infrastructure more aggressively. I enabled commenting on the draft page, so don't hesitate to chime in with your ideas!
Reading Material: Geoffrey West and Understanding Cities Through Science
Submitted by John on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 22:31
There's a great article by Jonah Lehrer in the New York Times Magazine about the work of physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt and their application of advanced math and statistics to urban studies (also linked to at Simtropolis, which is where I found it.) Lots of stuff for city sim fans to think about, but most importantly the idea that urbanization patterns can be explained in terms of a few relatively simple equations; obviously that has big implications for what we hope to do here. Fairly long but well worth taking a couple minutes to check out.
