Better Town Road Layout

[belugas]

One think that may help is to have some sort of a "Town road-type".

Grids are only commonplace in newish countriesm ie the US. Everwhere else road systems are a mess.

So we could have something like :
Squary town : In this style, all roads are connected in a square fashion. The overall growth could be circular, but with straigh lines. It would look like US and Canada towns.
Radiant town : Much more like european towns. A town-center and, weith help of righ-left turns, make it looks like a spider-web
Crazy town : would be randomized pattern, much like curent game

maybe more styles...

[scrooge]

I think there should not be dead end roads in the cities, like the ones I have pointed out. And I also think the minimum space between roads heading for the same direction should be 3 (or at least 2) tiles. That would also mean that the houses would have to be built 2 tiles away from the road (like on the picture below).

[Korenn]

this is just a random thought, here it goes:

the roads and buildings are pretty much on a different scale, it works for sky-scrapers, but not for small houses.

To me it seems that the problem is that the roads in ttd are only main roads, bigger roads. But small town houses and suburbian houses aren't normally built at main roads, they're built at smaller, townish roads.

The best way to solve this problem is to make the game define the sub urbs and smaller towns as a few main roads surrounded by housing areas. These areas would slowly be replaced by city centre areas, which can look a lot like the current ttd central city areas.
The housing areas however, would need to have some way of making them look more rural. A simple way would be to just make them filled with houses in the current engine, and devise a way of displaying nice townroads in the 32 bpp version (where the higher zoom levels mean you can add more detail).

anyone with added thoughts, counterthoughts?

[belugas]

I think there should not be dead end roads in the cities, like the ones I have pointed out.

I don't know about where you come from, but here, I do see some dead end roads in many towns.
Could be because a housing development is not finished, or because it was designed that way, or a natural/human obstacle blocked the way...

I don't think every road should be connected.

Further more, if ever you need to delete some tiles in order to place a station/lorry/heliport and don't want to kill some nice building, you'll be happy there was a ded end road ...

[Yoeri]

If Yoeri means AI. Nowdays, new AI uses road vehicles and builds very good roads with straight pieces, without stupid old AI's bugs

i ment the town-lay out patch

[scrooge]

I don't know about where you come from, but here, I do see some dead end roads in many towns.

Like Korenn said the roads in ttd look like main roads, and I think that usually they do not end just somewhere. But maybe I'm wrong, I haven't studied road layouts that much.
By the way, I think Koreanns idea is very good.