Virtual Environment, Reconstruction of Vanished City: Focusing on the Serious Game The Ruin Before

This paper introduces a serious game aimed at reconstructing war-damaged cities in a virtual setting, thereby providing an immersive experience of historical events. The game focused on the current conflict in Ukraine, reconstructing a city at a specific point in time, and allowing users to explore and interact with a meticulously detailed, historically realistic world. The principal processes in the game's development included the identification of a target city, acquisition of pertinent urban data from online sources, conversion of these data into a historically accurate style, and the design of non-playable characters (NPC) that display behaviors consistent with the era. Employing Meshy’s Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) map generation technology, we accurately simulated the interplay between light and materials to authentically replicate the city’s ambiance. The NPC were generated using ConvAI, a system based on ChatGPT that facilitates the incorporation of personality traits, background information, and event data, thereby animating them with contextual behaviors and narratives. The resulting game allowed users to interact with a meticulously reconstructed urban landscape and its people, providing a novel and instructive means of examining the effects of war through immersive virtual experiences.