The real Newcastle, every street where it really is, with the old city
breathing through it in the sea fret.
An open-world RPG I’m building in Godot, set in a 1:1 recreation of
Newcastle and part of Gateshead. You can go anywhere and the world
remembers what you did there, you get better at what you actually do,
and when the fret rolls up the Tyne the city’s Roman, medieval and
industrial past comes back through it.
The layout comes from data, not memory. A Python pipeline turns
OpenStreetMap footprints and the Environment Agency’s 1 m LIDAR into
256 m tiles of terrain, streets and buildings, with each building’s
height measured from the gap between the surface and the ground.
Landmarks are then built by hand on top, in a deliberately low-poly
style: the shapes are true, the detail is carved.
The hard part is fitting a real city into a frame budget. Tiles are
prepared on worker threads and their collision is attached a few
pieces per frame, so walking from one tile into the next doesn’t stall.
Early days. The first playable slice is about 1.5 by 1.3 km around the Tyne Bridge.
