Should the following Tier 3: up to $5,000 USD in MANA, 3 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Platform Contributor category be approved?
Abstract
Create, update and make freely available to the community a top-down view map of genesis city. We will run a mapping script and update the content on the map every month.
A prototype of the current version can be found here: https://genesis.city/
Grant size
5,000 USD
Beneficiary address
0x97cB89Ccb1511Ee8BEeF1DfF74bFB8E39139B5FA
Description
The scripting map is a fork of the official Decentraland explorer, modified to change the camera settings and automated to take screenshots of every coordinate in Genesis City. The website then takes all those images and stitches them together using OpenLayers, the open-source mapping software. The current version of the mapping script is a technical prototype and is very buggy, needing lots of manual interventions to complete the full map.
This grant will set up a budget, including salaries and expenses, to run this team for the next 3 months of developments and updates. Further grants will be requested by us in the future if the community is happy with our work, in order to continue to develop and regularly update the project.
Specification
A prototype can be found on https://genesis.city/. Funds are needed to further keep the project running and to provide infrastructure and maintenance for it.
Personnel
maraoz (github) - original map prototype creator, will oversee that the project’s vision is aligned with the Decentraland community.
A fully working and updated version of the map will be live by t+31 days.
The map’s content will be updated via script every month for 3 months. Once that time has elapsed we will request another similar or smaller grant in order to provide further maintenance and updates.
After launching the first prototype of genesis.city last year (see original post here), I’ve found this team to continue development and run the script to update the images. I already evaluated their skills and I’m confident they will be able to continue with the project, and I’ll also be checking their work for the duration of the grant. Hope the community funds this initiative!
I’m 100% in support of this proposal as a permanent feature for the inworld map.
Additionally, it would be amazing if you could take the same method for taking snapshots of land in plan and apply it to an isometric view from above so we can better see content in three dimensions.
I’ve used the prototype many times and found it to be incredibly useful for navigation and building references for scenes. Would love to see this as an integrated tool.
We will surely be looking into that but we have a big backlog ahead of us in making the script robust and easy to run. Thanks for the input. It’s great to see support already!
April Update
Hi! Over these two months, we’ve updated the Genesis City map twice, both times delivering maps with very few glitches or bugged tiles. We’ve also added a “Jump to” button. Right-clicking on a map tile will now take you to the desired tile in game. Go check it out, we hope you like it: https://genesis.city/
During May we will be working on being able to run the script faster, to reduce the update frequency, and on making the “zoom out - zoom in” experience smoother.
May Update Hi all! We have updated the map once again. We have been working on reducing the human interventions and the time it takes to run the mapping script. We’re happy to share that we have accomplished this: map update time was reduced from weeks to days! We’ve also smoothed out the zoom-out experience by creating larger stitched-together images, so instead of loading a lot of images one by one you will experience faster full map load times at farther away zoom levels. We hope you like it! https://genesis.city/