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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallDevelopers make real places convincing in games by combining geographic and historical research with scanned, procedural, and hand-authored content, then adapting the result for play. The goal is not necessarily to reproduce every street or slope: it is to preserve the location’s recognizable character while making the world readable, playable, and practical to run.
1. Decide what makes the place recognizable
Work begins with a location and a reference brief. The team gathers material such as maps, photographs, topography, historical records, and accounts from people who know the place. It then identifies the features that matter most: perhaps the shape of a valley, a distinctive skyline, a street pattern, local vegetation, or the way buildings and open ground meet.
Different references answer different questions. Elevation data can describe slopes and terrain; photographs and film show surface details, lighting, and visual character; historical documents can indicate how a place looked at a particular time. A useful brief also states how much spatial fidelity the game needs. A recognizable route or landmark may matter more than exact measurements everywhere.
For Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, Expression Games senior art director Ryan Playle-Howard described drawing on historical documentation, war diaries, first-person accounts, field imagery, film footage, topographic references from Google Maps and Google Earth, and digital elevation models. He said the team adjusted locations where needed for mechanics and gameplay. In a September 7, 2026 interview, he reported that the project covered around 24 square kilometres across six maps—a figure specific to that game, not an industry benchmark.
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2. Choose the right way to build the world
There is no single production method that suits every environment. Scanning can provide detailed source geometry for an object or scene; GIS and elevation data can help establish geographic structure; procedural rules can create broad areas with consistent variation; and hand-authored work gives artists direct control over important spaces. Teams can combine these approaches.
| Approach | Useful for | What it does not solve on its own |
|---|---|---|
| Photogrammetry or laser-scan reconstruction | Capturing detailed geometry from images or laser scans. Epic described RealityCapture’s reconstruction capabilities in its March 2021 acquisition announcement. | A scan is source material, not automatically an optimized, playable game asset. It still has to be made to work in the game and engine. |
| GIS and elevation data | Representing real-world spatial structure and terrain. Esri’s CityEngine 2024.0 tour describes scenes based on real-world GIS data as well as fictional cities. | Geographic data alone does not determine how a space should guide or support play. |
| Procedural rules and modular assets | Building structured, varied environments across large areas. Esri documents a CityEngine Unreal Engine plugin that applies shape-grammar rules to procedural buildings, with adjustable height, style, and appearance. | Rules need to be directed and reviewed; procedural output does not automatically provide the right landmarks, transitions, or gameplay spaces. |
| Hand-authored design | Shaping important locations, routes, and transitions where specific artistic or gameplay decisions matter. | It can require substantial authoring effort when the world is broad or contains many repeated elements. |
These methods are complementary rather than competing recipes. The practical choice depends on the required geographic accuracy, asset detail, coverage, editing control, iteration cost, engine integration, player readability, and performance.
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3. Turn reference into a playable place
A real location is not automatically a good level. Designers decide which distances, routes, landmarks, open areas, cover, and transitions should stay faithful and which should change. The same terrain can play very differently depending on sightlines, movement options, and where players encounter one another.
Playle-Howard’s account of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam illustrates this trade-off: open spaces can support vehicles and longer-range combat, while tighter, covered areas can support close combat. Zoning, directional cues, and recognizable landmarks help players understand where they are and where they can go. Authenticity is therefore not just visual resemblance; the layout also needs to make sense as a space players use.
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As Playle-Howard put it, “For me, a good environment is ultimately one where art, gameplay and authenticity are all working together.” He also said, “The location needs to bring something new to the title.” Those are project-specific design principles, not a formula that every game must follow.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.4. Use procedural production where it helps—and keep control of the result
Procedural tools can establish structure and variation over broad areas, while artists focus on distinctive sites and transitions. Esri’s Unreal Engine plugin documents procedural buildings created from CityEngine shape-grammar rules. Epic’s City Sample provides a separate example: Houdini tools generate city structure and components, the output is brought into Unreal Engine, and modular assets are instanced.
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The City Sample documentation is for Unreal Engine 5.8 and describes World Partition loading parts of that large sample scene on demand. It is an example of one project’s workflow, not a requirement for every game or a guarantee that a similarly built world will meet another game’s needs.
Rules-based population and tools can extend a team’s reach, but they do not remove the need for artistic judgment. Playle-Howard described using rules-based population alongside hand-authored work, and identified repeated assets, technical performance, and keeping tools subordinate to artistic and design goals as challenges. The useful division is not “procedural or handmade”; it is deciding where consistency and scale help, and where a location needs deliberate authorship.
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5. Balance detail, readability, and performance
More detail does not automatically make a game environment more convincing. Players need to read landmarks, routes, zones, and changes in the space; the game also has to run within its technical limits. Teams therefore balance density and variety against content scale and target-platform performance, often preserving the most distinctive details where they matter most to navigation or play.
When evaluating a workflow, ask what must be accurate, where variation is needed, which areas deserve close authoring, and how the result will integrate with the chosen engine. A scan may provide a strong reference for an object but still need production work. GIS may anchor a layout without deciding how it plays. Procedural generation may cover a city efficiently while leaving key spaces for human direction. The convincing result comes from fitting the method to the design problem.
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