Endless Field

A Flower-inspired (thatgamecompany) wind game: an endless procedural grassland rendered with WebGPU through vgpu. You are the wind. Carry a stream of petals, bloom glowing flowers, and watch the dry golden field turn green behind you.

Run

npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:5173
npm run build      # typecheck + production build
./tools/check.sh   # validate every WGSL entry shader against a real WebGPU device

Needs a WebGPU browser (recent Chrome / Edge / Safari; on iPhone, iOS 26).

Assets are delivered compressed: images as WebP and meshes as gzip (tools/web-assets.py makes the copies and public/assets/web.json; run it after changing any asset), about 27 MB instead of 69. On phones the game loads small texture copies (tools/phone-textures.py, regenerate after changing a texture) a couple at a time and draws near trees with their lighter mesh. A start that never finished (a phone killed the page while loading) makes the next one start lighter still; ?lite=0|1|2 picks a level for one visit.

Controls

Input	Action
Mouse / touch position	Steer
Hold click / Space	Gust (speed up)
Shift / W, Ctrl / S	Rise, dive
A / D	Turn
B	Rest: the swallow lands and settles (it also does when left alone for 40 s)
O	Settings (quality presets, render scale, grass density, draw distance, frame cap, auto resolution)
F	Frame counter (fps, CPU and GPU ms)
N	Day / night
M	Free roam: walk (WASD, mouse look, Shift sprint) or fly (V; Space / C up and down)

What is in it

• Grass: GPU-driven. A compute pass places world-anchored blades around the camera, frustum-culls them, computes wind ripples and the stream's push, and appends instances for indirect draws. Three LOD rings reach the horizon with dithered crossfades.
• World: endless procedural hills, subtle biomes (meadow, grove, savanna, forest), a meandering river with shallows, a pebble shore and reeds, flower beds, and sparse trees on crests. Terrain, river, biome and bed functions are mirrored in WGSL and TypeScript so the CPU and GPU always agree.
• Gameplay: closed flowers glow; passing through blooms them with a chime, adds their petal to your stream and restores the land around them.
• Birds: the swallow you fly, meadow sparrows, the river's kingfisher and buzzards in the thermals are modeled, rigged and animated in Blender (flap, glide, stoop, landing flare, take-off, perched idle, preening, hops and pecks), baked to skinning matrices and blended on the GPU.
• Night: moon and stars, swarming fireflies, glowing flowers and bioluminescent grass.
• Rendering: HDR + 4x MSAA, reversed-Z, bloom, ACES tone mapping, GPU timers, frame cap and dynamic resolution.

Asset pipeline

Raw downloads go to assets-src/ (git-ignored); built web assets live in public/assets/.

node tools/fetch-polyhaven.mjs jacaranda_tree 1k
blender -b --factory-startup --python tools/blender/build_tree.py -- tools/trees/jacaranda.json
blender -b --factory-startup --python tools/blender/build_plants.py -- tools/plants/gazania.json

• Trees: each leaf card is refit as a 2-triangle quad, bark is simplified with meshoptimizer, and Blender bakes an 8-view impostor (albedo + normals) for far LODs.
• Birds: blender -b --factory-startup --python tools/blender/model_birds.py -- public/assets/birds [--preview <dir>] [--blend <file.blend>] builds every species; --blend saves the rigged scenes with their actions for editing, --preview renders frames of each clip.
• Plants: variants are re-centered, simplified, and their diffuse + alpha merged with color bleeding for clean mips.

Credits

All third-party assets are CC0 from Poly Haven: Jacaranda Tree, Island Tree 02, Gazania, Ursinia, Empodium, Dandelion 01, Heliophila (models) and Ganges River Pebbles (texture). Everything else (grass, flowers, petals, sky, water, audio) is procedural.