Exploring Three Mile Island in Cesium for Unreal
In 1979, Unit 2 at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, partially melted down. Developer Radiointeractive is using Cesium to develop TMI: America's Chernobyl as an interactive 3D game exploring fictional outcomes after the partial meltdown.
This still from the game’s main menu depicts Three Mile Island as it was in 2019, during permanent shutdown and ongoing decommissioning.
The focus of the game is the Three Mile Island power station, which users can explore inside and out. Players take on the role of a control room operator during a blackout in 2003, tasked with stopping another meltdown at TMI. The game is being created by fusing multiple datasets, all hosted and tiled into 3D Tiles on Cesium ion. Radiointeractive is pulling in datasets of Three Mile Island and the surrounding area from Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access to Cesium ion and using the Bing Maps Aerial imagery available in the platform.
The main scan of the power station was created by an artist as an add-on for Microsoft Flight Simulator and then converted into .fbx/.obj for importing it into Unreal Engine. Radiointeractive is using blueprints from the 1970s and assets from the UE Marketplace to recreate the inside of the plant.
Cesium for Unreal enables Radiointeractive to replace the original model’s flat, nonspecific terrain and imagery with an accurate depiction of the area, showing both aerial and ground views of the island and enabling first- and third-person views for players to immerse themselves in the history of the power plant.
The game features accurate aerial and ground views of Three Mile Island.
Radiointeractive plans to release the game on Steam and GameJolt in fall 2022.
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