Futuricity Blog

Monday (24/10/2005) was the deadline for completing the research for the project and also the day that we had to give a presentation on the direction of Futuricity. The report weighs in at a meager 31 pages and the presentation took an impressive 10mins (we ran over)!

You can find all the details of the research and presentation on their respective sections of the site.

There will be a massive media update on this site in the next few days as we add all our prototype stuff (including some cool sound samples) into the Media Player.

After the long summer break we are finally getting started on the Futuricity project. The script is all set, all that is required are a few minor changes to where scenes take place. Some snappy dialouge would be nice too.

The site is going to get a lot larger over the course of this next term. We are required to submit all our research very soon and that will include details of the technology we use, as well how we got our ideas about what the city would look like.

More soon….promise!

So after days of me sitting and almost crying at the keyboard the site is almost ready to go. I say almost because I’m sure there are bugs in there, probably all over the place. For anyone interested here is a run down of the technology behind the site.

The page engine is based on PHP and MySQL using mod_rewrite to deliver the pages to the user as if they come from different directories. In reality the pages are all saved in a database and pulled out by one file. For example if you access about/syndication you’ll see futuricity.info/about/syndication. What actually happens is the site looks for the syndication page, under the about category.

The Media Player works based on a similar principle. Each media link is a JavaScript call to a function that opens a new window. When you call that function it looks to see if a media file is specified, we do that so we can send you to a specific file easily rather than you having to click through to find it. If a file is specified then the Media Player looks in it’s database and presents the file selected. If not file is specified it starts up in a sort of stand by mode, waiting for you to choose a file to play.

The other major part of the site is the RSS engine, this allows us to produce lists of just about anything that’s database controlled on our site, which is everything! Currently we produce feeds for the latest media file and the newest pages on the site.

It’s only fair to mention that the Media Player and RSS engine are licenced by PerryTech and not created specifically for the site. You probably think that this isn’t important but it needs to be mentioned so it’s clear that they fall outside of the Universities copyright.

Over the coming months we should see the site grow into a fantastic resource for everything Futuricity. Who knows I might even add a spell checker for the pages!

Mark