Project News

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!

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.

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!

In keeping with the recent article on the subject, there's now a field for Phase One Funding in the "Contribution Status" section of the member profiles.  If you'd like to see development beginning sooner, consider moving a portion (or all) of your pledge into the Phase One field!