Comparison of Flow Path Mapping Between Unreal Engine and ArcGIS: The Potential Role for Game Engines in GIScience

Abstract

Advances in the videogame industry, particularly game engines, offer promising, unconventional tools for processing spatial data and representing complex geographical processes through integrated physics. This thesis explores the potential of using Unreal Engine (UE) as a multi-disciplinary platform for combining simulation models from the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with GIS. We present a case study implementing a fluid simulation workflow using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and quantitatively compare its results to conventional flowpath mapping methods (D8). A multi-spatial resolution raster comparison revealed that the UE model produced flow paths with a similar length to traditional methods, but with fine-scale disagreements on where flow occurs. The vector path analysis found that the UE model produced more but shorter paths than the D8. The comparison highlights the viability of game engines for dynamic simulation and suggests extensions to broader geocomputation applications such as erosion modelling. Moreover, this research demonstrates how leveraging game engine capabilities can contribute to a more integrative evolution of GIScience.