In our new game, we have set ourselves a difficult, but very interesting task - to recreate the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in its state in April, 1986. Probably, this wasn't done in any game before (excluding mods and games like Stalker, where locations are made like in the reality, but placement of objects is different).
So, let's start by approximately determining the map size:
We model the roads and place the objects by referring to photos taken from satellites.
As you can see, the map proportions are real. We are planning to recreate the central street of Pripyat and roads to Jupiter factory, Janov station, Red Forest, radiolocational station Duga, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and surroundings, the central street of Chernobyl etc.
But today we'll show you central street of Pripyat and compare it to the real one.
On the central square, Polissya hotel is situated. Here is how it looked before the disaster:
And here is how it looks in our game (the camera angle is slightly different and FOV is adjusted a little):
Here's the famous Culture Palace Energetik (the photo is taken after the explosion, but we can see which billboards were there at the time):
We turn the camera towards the trading center and restaurant:
Here is how it looked after the explosion:
We also paid a lot of attention to vegetation on the streets. We think that Chernobyl is associated with southern poplar for many people, and here it is:
Young trees painted in white are also here:
Searching for photos back from 1986 takes quite a lot of time. There are earlier photos where there are differences, for example billboards.
On the other side of the street, a nine floor house with inscription "Glory to Lenin, Glory to Party" is located. High-level employees of the nuclear power plant and officials lived here. The street on the middle leads out of the town.
Now the streets look a little bit empty because they lack pedestrians and cars. We're in progress of implementing them, so we'll show them later.
The central square from the window of the bus ready to evacuate the people:
Finally, a screenshot with Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant: its silhouette is visible on the back. We'll show it in detail in one of the following posts.
We hope the post was interesting for you. If you have proposals or comments, let us know in the comments, we're constantly reading them.
Thank you for attention!