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.
