Work in progress

Lubbock Drive

A drivable Lubbock, Texas, built in Unreal Engine 5. Real roads and building outlines from open map data, real-time lighting, traffic, people and weather. These are screenshots from the game as it stands today.

A residential street in the game: houses set back behind lawns, parked cars, utility poles and autumn trees under a blue sky

The neighbourhood

The car on the avenue seen from behind — Behind the wheel. The car spawns in the right-hand lane and drives.

The residential street from above — 140 houses, driveways, fences, poles and 329 trees.

A brick house with its lawn, driveway and a parked car — Houses, cars and trees are modelled for this project in Blender.

A pedestrian walking along the pavement — Pedestrians walk the pavements. These are placeholder figures; realistic people are being built.

The real district

The real-map district from above — About 1.3 by 2.2 km around UMC, Covenant and west Texas Tech, at true scale.

A large hospital building at street level — 357 buildings on their real outlines. Heights are mostly estimates for now.

Driver's view on 4th Street — Real roads with lane markings and signalled junctions.

Where it stands

Working today

Driving on both levels
Real-time lighting, sky and clouds
Sound: engine, tyres, horn, crashes
Impacts: props knocked over, parked cars shoved
Pedestrians who react when hit (no gore)

Being built

Realistic people
Live weather and real time of day
Traffic on the real road network
Building interiors
Better impact effects

Playing it

The game runs on a Mac from the Unreal project. A version that plays in the browser is planned but not available yet: Unreal's browser export is experimental and needs a special engine build.

The 100-Mile Ward

The browser atlas of Lubbock that this grew out of, with a drive mode that runs on any device: lubbock-100-mile-ward.pages.dev