City Planning - Simplified layout // Part 1: Diamond cities

[deadpine]

Note: This proposal was already discussed in slack but the team suggested me to upload it here. Also It’ll help to understand Priscila's 'diamonds' references on her new proposal :)

Name: Patternized layout - Part 1: Diamond cities Purpose: Simplified construction & development

Introduction

Based on the proposals #2 and #6, I decided to translate the city layout to a simple grid. The idea is to make easier the programing stage of Decentraland, where there is no need to define all the sizes at the beginning, but to create a unit which size can be modified or defined later.

For doing this, I made a simple shape for its use as a primary unit, like a pixel in photos. For the moment I’ll call it ‘tile’. The purpose of this is to define the size of lands, roads, boulevards and cities not in meters or inches, but instead, in a relation between tiles and scales.

Part 1: Diamond cities

Construction

Maintaining the concept of hexagonal cities and avoiding the square shapes, this 'diamond' tile is made by merging two equilateral triangles.

Using Priscila's city layout I translated the elements into a grid, respecting the central tile for the teleportation system and the streets coming from it directed towards the limits of the city, which is also surrounded by other ring of streets. In addition next to the teleportation system and at the streets intersections I added tiles designated to the public lands, concept I explain here.

This is an example of how a city could be seen using a LAND made of 4 tiles:

A city size can be easily changed by adding more lands surrounding the center and streets.

Note: This LAND size is defined by connecting 4 tiles because I considered it the simplest starting point and can be changed as it needed.

What I find important here is the concept of no pre-defined sizes. This way the size of the elements will be bigger or smaller depending on the amount of tiles contained, as well as their relation with the rest of the elements.

While walking on Decentraland, a street will look thinner not because its size has changed, but rather because of its proportional size in relation with the adjacent LANDs.

Hexagonal modules

After building these diamond-shaped cities I propose to take 3, change the rotation axis and join them creating hexagonal modules. The first approach I've taken came from how quadrants are organized in isometric grids.

but... When showing and discussing this idea on slack some members from the community asked why I was building cubes. Actually, there are not 3D cubes in this layout and it’s only an optical illusion from the brain when trying to translate the isometric 2D plane to 3D. Therefore I also tried using other rotation angle.

Finally, here is a zoom out of how the city might look like

Thanks for reading!

[deadpine]

When finishing this proposal I realized that this distribution of streets does not contemplate a good user experience for moving or discovering content in lands. I'll explain a possible solution in the next proposal :)

[maraoz]

Love it!!

[aesedepece]

@blancoagostina Very well explained proposal! I love the idea of no pre-defined sizes.

I agree with you that this can be a rather frustrating street layout from a UX stand point. You can easily spot this kind of patterns in cities like Madrid, and I can assure you it makes mental route planning too confusing because it forces you to zigzag and walk as much as twice the linear distance between A and B. Maybe I'm a just too obsessed with optimization, but what annoys me the most when I roam walk those streets is how often I have to divert more than 30º from my direction. In this layout the maximum diversion angle is 60º, while in the classic square grid layout it is limited to 45º.

I am really looking forward to read your next proposal!!! :D