Open world in browser series guide

By Oleg Sidorkin, CTO and Co-Founder of Cinevva

This page is the navigation hub for the full series.

If you arrived from one random part, start here.

What "spike" means in this series

A spike is a short, focused experiment.

Each spike tests one risky question. We keep scope tight, measure what matters, and decide what to do next. It is not a polished feature. It is a learning instrument.

In this project, spikes are mostly standalone pages under /spikes/* that you can run live.

Read the series in order

1. Part 1: We started by trying to break it
2. Part 2: Worker physics and the input lag fear
3. Part 3: The unflashy spikes that saved us
4. Part 4: Streaming before fancy terrain
5. Part 5: Budgeting the pretty stuff
6. Part 6: Clipmaps changed the plot
7. Part 7: Marching cubes and the first real caves
8. Part 8: Integration without losing our baseline
9. Part 9: Transvoxel started with a scaffold
10. Part 10: Seam chaos and the corner boss fight
11. Part 11: Policy mode, not hardcoded mode
12. Part 12: Rings, sky fog, and what we would do again

Live spike map

Start with these if you want to click through the technical timeline directly.

Spike 1 terrain and instancing · source
Spike 2 worker physics · source
Spike 3 Durable Object broadcast load test ran as a service script, not a standalone page
Spike 4 mobile quality constraints, tested via Spike 1 query param
Spike 5 LLM behavior reliability, ran as a script, not a standalone page
Spike 6 chunk load and swap · source
Spike 7 vegetation from density maps · source
Spike 8 terrain material cost · source
Spike 9 cascaded shadows budget · source
Spike 10 clipmaps and geomorphing · source
Spike 11 heightmap chunk streaming · source
Spike 12 WebGPU marching cubes · source
Spike 13 WebGPU integration baseline · source
Spike 14 incremental hardening · source
Spike 15 seam scaffold · source
Spike 16 first Transvoxel face · source
Spike 17 dual MC LOD · source
Spike 18 heightmap seam · source
Spike 19 mixed-resolution corner · source
Spike 20 GPU corner seam · source
Spike 21 GPU MC corner seam · source
Spike 22 MC to HM fallback · source
Spike 23 policy-based chunk modes · source
Spike 24 clipmap rings and sky fog · source