Bet you can build an entire city, with 100% enterable buildings before GTA VI!? 🥹 (Patreon)

It's been more than a month, right? But you know me... I tend to lose myself in my work when I find something, and I do my best to make it usable and share it with you all. And, as usual, I stumbled upon something extraordinary: a hidden feature of Unreal Engine, with little to no documentation, used for debugging in that CitySamplePCG demo I was running around naked in during my last post. It turns out to be an insanely powerful tool for creating entire city grids, with roads, sidewalks and plazas, in a matter of seconds.

So, I've built a fairly simple PCG system around it that works just as you see: a city spline grid you can modify however you want, artery spline actors you can modify however you want (the red ones), and collector road splines (the green ones) you can also modify however you want. The rest is grid-based splitting, with parameters you can control, of course.

Now... I know there are a ton of city generators out there, but this one is special for two reasons. One: it's stupidly fast and incredibly simple. And two... well... here I'd like to take a bit more time to explain.

See, as a game developer who wants to create something unique (and a gamer, of course), I look at the giants, the world shifters... I look at what they do and at how every media outlet drools over everything they do. Sometimes it's justified, but most of the time it's not.

And honestly, I kinda got sick of all the brainless bullshit being thrown around left and right, mostly by idiot YouTubers who only care about clicks and sponsorships. And not just about big studios, but also about Unreal. I've had my fair share of hate for the engine, especially because it gave me a lot of sleepless nights, bugs, and countless ExitCode 6 build errors... Still, I didn't make a fuss about them to farm clicks. I fixed them, improved them, made them usable and shared them.

Sorry for the outburst, but I had to let it out, because it's, in a way, the reason I made this post and shared this video. I won't go into the technical details, because those will be shared when the tool is released.

Still, there are a few things I'd like you all to know:

The city grid (as seen in the video) is about 2 square kilometers, and it's generated in real time on my build rig (RTX 3060 12 GB VRAM, 32 GB of RAM, Ryzen 7 5800X CPU). No speed-ups, no fakes.

The title isn't clickbait. It was inspired by that overhyped statement that there are 700 locations you can explore in GTA VI. Well... that doesn't seem so hard, does it!? As you can see, you CAN enter every building and every apartment in the entire city. Everything is interactable: doors, windows, lights. And everything is procedurally generated and adjustable afterwards, if you fancy a different style.

Unreal Engine can be quite performant, provided you actually care about it and don't just throw 50 GB of Fab assets into a map and call it a "game". By the way, the FPS you see in the top right corner is in-editor, and the dynamic city isn't Nanite-built yet. I did create a mesh builder that bakes everything into grid blocks of Nanite meshes (the end part of the video), but for now I didn't let it finish, because it takes roughly 5–8 minutes and it's not relevant to the post's main topic.

Last, and most importantly, 80% of what you see in this video was generated by Claude, using the MCPs for Unreal and Blender. And NO, it wasn't made with one prompt, 2 billion tokens and $16,000 spent in 12 hours... But more on this in a future post. Because the use of AI, and the clickbait-chasing YouTube content creators who get millions of views with "AI made GTA VI in a day" bullshit, is another thing I want to address.

I didn't build GTA in 12 hours, and neither did they, to be fair. But I DID build a tool that can help you build an actual GTA-style city. And it won't cost you 2 billion tokens. Just a monthly subscription 😉

See you in Nemo's Cays, Bahamas!

Fireblade