Truman Show in Unreal: My AI Town That Plays Itself
From Unreal Engines Diary · 35:32
Show by cMonkX | Unreal Engine Indie Dev
Today's goal in the virtual world: explain where I've been for two months, own up to an accidental episode that slipped out, and update you honestly on the thing I care about most — a self-running town inside a dome.Lelit Distrikt https://wojciechhupert.github.io/LelitDistrikt_Website/CPS (Content Propagation System, Lelit Distrikt's engine) https://contextpropagationsystem.com/Development Update: The Dome TownI stepped into 3D a few years ago after seeing a scene in the movie Smoke — a tobacco store in 1990s Brooklyn — and wanting to live in that vibe. I built it in Blender, hit the wall when I realized Blender isn't a game engine, and moved to Unreal Engine, rebuilding low-poly with UE's built-in modeling tools. The store became a street, the street a town, and I realized what I actually wanted was a live simulation: a world where every character has an identity, a context, and a memory — where the NPCs would know you.Today the visual layer runs in Unreal (a Scan Factory Italian town preset I'm heavily customizing), and the 'brain' is built in Python with OpenAI Codex — I walked away from doing it inside Unreal because I couldn't get what I wanted there. Roughly 150 systems keep the simulation persistent. The one piece I'm still fighting: making every citizen genuinely reflect, observe, and remember — not as a chatbot, but persistently, without me prompting all day.I was supposed to freeze the project before September 1st. I'm a few days late — I'll own that too. Once the last piece clicks, I'm doing a soak-test livestream: the simulation runs for a week or a month while we watch characters with occupations and habits get interrupted, inspired, and hopefully produce emergent behavior that wasn't planned and isn't a hallucination.Takeaways from the EngineTechnical Wall: If NPCs have no eyes, I must document every object in the level — coordinates and JSON maps — so they can perceive architecture and pathways. Giving them eyes means constant screenshots and vision analysis, and the cost explodes.AI/Vibe Coding Win: The brain is Python + Codex. I also prototype world-generation ideas — NPCs creating their own 3D models, or diffusion-generated worlds on the fly — where Unreal's role becomes placeholders and blockers.MetaHuman Status: The town felt 'alive' once MetaHumans walked around with simple Blueprints — but that was surface life. The real life is the persistent memory and relationship system.Where This Is GoingThe world is an artificial city in a dome — Truman Show meets Westworld, with a bit of Matrix. Citizens don't know they're in a simulation; some do and refuse to talk about it. Every backstory is handcrafted. And the cliffhanger: some characters can message me outside the game over Telegram or WhatsApp — tested in isolation, and it works.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/WAQ2-qfJrzs**contact me:** [email protected]
More episodes of Unreal Engines Diary
More episodes
- Starting Over in Unreal Engine: From Eternal Learner to Finishing Things
- The Black Friday Haul (Rome - Italian Town) MetaHuman Clothing Crisis: Why Dressing Virtual Characters Costs More Than Real Ones
- Virtual Fashion in Unreal Engine: Why I Stopped Designing for Screens
- Mobile 3D Workflow: Building in Unreal Engine on a MacBook
- Creativity: Do Our Best Days Expire?
- FAB 2025 Review: What the Marketplace Data Tells Us About Solo Dev Survival
- When Life Gets in the Way: A Developer's Real Talk
- The Daily 5 Minutes: How Showing Up in Unreal Engine Changed My Workflow
- AI Takes My Job, But Gives Me Purpose // Meshcapade acquisition // Seeddance 2.0
- AI Identity Crisis: What Happens to Craft When Prompts Replace Skills
PodSearch is a free, independent podcast search engine. Read about PodSearch, the privacy policy or contact us.