An improved virtual environment creation and testing process can be achieved by a combination of spatial partitioning and reverse tree generation. The reverse tree may be representative of the virtual environment and may be generated starting from a smallest portion or zone of the virtual environment (represented as a leaf node) and expanding up towards a root node representative of the entire virtual environment. Advantageously, the system can add new zones to the virtual environment and representative tree data structure that are external to the existing virtual environment without generating a new tree data structure. Thus, the computing resources utilized by the system disclosed herein may be significantly reduced compared to existing processes while improving the flexibility of the spatial partitioning and tree generation process thereby enabling spatial partitioning to be performed in real or near real time as a developer authors the virtual environment.