Photoreal Three.js camping world — first-person, self-play iterated to cap (20 iterations)

[ilikevibecoding]

🎮 Play it now — no merge, no install

Click to play (CDN, pinned build):
https://rawcdn.githack.com/ilikevibecoding/My-projects/dd19ef3f8d535839b9ad1ed1f9b64f840d6da209/camping-world/play/index.html

Always-latest variant (tracks this branch): https://raw.githack.com/ilikevibecoding/My-projects/cursor/bc-5fd2158d-847b-44d3-b77f-90ba063719c5-2695/camping-world/play/index.html

githack shows a one-time "External Content Notice" interstitial — click Open the page. First visit streams ~160 MB of photoscanned assets, so the loading screen takes a moment. The production Vite build is committed at camping-world/play/ so the whole game runs straight off the CDN with zero deployment.

Verified end-to-end from the CDN URL in headless Chrome — game boots, __READY fires, campsite renders:

Game running live from the CDN — campsite viewpoint

---

Photoreal Three.js camping world

A first-person camping clearing aiming for an RDR2-style golden-hour mood: rolling dry meadow cupped by a treeline, photoscanned trees and deadwood, a stone fire pit with lumpy ash + charcoal, and ~130k instanced grass cards in the wind. Built in camping-world/ with Vite + Three.js, iterated via an automated self-play screenshot loop to the 20-iteration cap.

Controls

WASD walk (2.2 m/s) · Shift sprint (4.8 m/s) · mouse look (pointer lock) · Esc release. 1.7 m eye height, terrain following, head bob, collision vs trunks/boulders/props.

Self-play loop (iter 0 → 20)

Deterministic 6-viewpoint screenshot harness (?shot=1, Playwright + SwiftShader), scored each iteration against a 10-item realism rubric, then targeted fixes.

Iteration 0 (gray-box)	Iteration 20 (final)

Final viewpoints: campsite · wide vista · backlit camp · hero tree · grass eye-level

Highlights of the iteration log

• Iters 1–7: real terrain splat shader (3 photoscanned ground sets, two-scale de-tiling), HDRI sky + measured-azimuth sun, 3-LOD photoscan trees, instanced grass with baked card atlas + wind, campsite layout, post stack (SMAA → N8AO → bloom → grade/vignette/grain).
• Iters 8–15: chased the single worst defect — a pale cream band across the mid-distance that read "video-game desert." Darkening albedo/fog barely moved it.
• Root cause (iter 16): stripped the grass layer and sampled actual rendered pixels — terrain with albedo 0.185 was rendering (243, 228, 197). The band was grazing-angle Fresnel specular mirroring the bright sky, not diffuse color. Fixed in the terrain + grass shaders (roughness floor 0.96, indirect/direct specular knocked to ~0.1).
• Iters 17–20: rebalanced exposure after the specular kill, dome-shaped lumpy ash bed with charcoal chunks, warmed blue-green foliage tints, stone fire pit env response.

Functional verification

Deterministic fixed-step movement tests (scripts/test-movement.mjs): walk 2.20 m/s ✓, sprint 4.79 m/s ✓, eye height 1.70 m ±bob ✓, tree collision stops the player ✓, pointer-lock look ✓.

Assets

All CC0 from Poly Haven (photoscanned models, ground textures, HDRI), fetched by scripts/fetch-assets.mjs and crunched by a gltf-transform pipeline (weld/simplify/WebP/meshopt) in scripts/optimize-assets.mjs. Credits in the README.

Notes

• camping-world/play/ is the committed production build that powers the CDN link above. Rebuild with npm run build and re-copy if the source changes.
• A GitHub Pages deploy from this branch was attempted but the github-pages environment's branch protection only allows main + one legacy branch; the workflow change was reverted to keep CI green. If you ever want it on ehpurple.com/play/, allow this branch in the environment settings or merge.

_{To show artifacts inline, enable in settings.}

  

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for GitHub.

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
my-projects	Ready	Preview, Comment	Jun 12, 2026 5:10am
my-projects-kf1f	Ready	Preview, Comment	Jun 12, 2026 5:10am