Drone Simulator: France Edition

Inspiration

France is a beautiful country with a rich culture and interesting cities. After previously creating a world using aerial imagery of Innsbruck, I wanted to take the next step and work with a full 3D city model. I discovered that high-quality open data for the city of Saint-Étienne was freely available, and since it is a lesser-known but fascinating city, it became the perfect choice for this project. This time, I also wanted to focus more on NPC-driven interaction. That’s why Pierre and Zoé were created—two humorous and charming characters who introduce players to drone flying while sharing their love for France and Saint-Étienne.

What it does

Drone Simulator: France Edition lets players fly a drone across the city and land on heliports suspended from balloons. Each heliport is positioned above a real landmark, encouraging players to explore the city from the air. Landing on the correct heliport within the time limit rewards XP, combining skill-based drone control with exploration of the city.

How we built it

The city was built from open access 3d data and processed in Blender, where the environment was optimized to meet Horizon Worlds’ limits on scale, texture size, and vertex count. The city tiles were then merged, baked, and exported as FBX files for use in Horizon Worlds.

NPCs were created using the built-in NPC Editor, complete with custom backstories and dialogue.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was balancing visual quality with technical requirements. The environment needed to look detailed and appealing while staying within Horizon Worlds’ performance boundaries.