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This is the second pedestrian-focused installment in the How to Build an Open-World Game series. Part 1 covered scheduling and decision-making up to the point where an event has produced a task slot. This article covers the other half: how a task becomes observable behavior, how scenario points populate the environment, and where locomotion, animation, … Read more
Part of the “AI-Native Game Development” series. The June kickoff post named “converting FPS into TPS” as the first thesis to validate in Phase Two, and promised to “record completion as completion, and setbacks as setbacks.” A month and change later, it’s done — these two posts are the delivery record. 1. What This Record … Read more
— From a reverse-engineered generation model to pre-landing engineering verification AI-Assisted Game Development · Asset Reverse-Engineering Series · Terrain Pre-Landing Verification Where this fits: earlier in this series we took apart a game’s procedural level generation — the terrain article read out the recipe that “terrain isn’t stored as a heightmap, but computed on the … Read more
Series The City That Runs Itself · Pedestrians · Scheduling Layer Previous (series overview): Rebuilding a City That Runs Itself in UE5. This article picks up from it, going deep on the crowd / population part. The traffic article covered how vehicle flow is scheduled. This one turns the lens to the crowds on the … Read more
This article is one of the deep-dive installments of the How to Build an Open-World Game series (the series overview, *A Systems Overview*, is here—reading it first is recommended for the big picture), focused on a single point deep enough to deserve its own piece: when a street has to keep hundreds of NPCs and … Read more
For mid-to-senior engineers with an UE rendering background. The whole article uses, as a reference implementation, a runtime weapon-batching system shipped in a large FPS that has been live on mobile — walking through its overall flow, key technical choices, and implementation-level details: how to collapse a modular weapon assembled from a dozen parts into … Read more
AI-Assisted Game Dev · Asset Reverse-Engineering Series, Part 4 · Scene Ecology Intro: The Ground Is Laid — Now, What Goes On Top? This is the companion follow-up to the terrain article. That article covered “how a planet’s ground comes to be” — how terrain tiles are cut, how biome surface materials are procedurally colored, … Read more
AI-Assisted Game Development · Asset Reverse-Engineering Series · Level Terrain Prologue: Open the Level, and Look at the Ground Beneath Your Feet The previous articles extracted assets from binary, imported them into the engine, and restored them to their coordinates. Once that was done, a level could be opened — buildings stand, crates are scattered, … Read more
In the previous article, *AI-Native Game Dev · Reverse-Engineering a Game Character Model into the Engine*, I pulled the assets of a third-person shooter’s characters and monsters — meshes, skeletons, materials — out of its package files and into the engine. That article was about whether the assets could be imported, and imported correctly. But … Read more
Migrating a mature open-world RPG’s city runtime to UE5: the driving core, entities, crowd AI, smart objects, pathfinding, vehicles/traffic, cross-system readiness gates, and LLM-driven gameplay — source-grounded analysis plus a UE5.8 rebuild blueprint.