Opus 5.5 has once again destroyed my expectations for games and 3D modeling. A full survival game like The Forest, in three.js, in 1 day of continual work. A 2 km island carved by simulated erosion. 44,000 trees, every one generated in code and wrapped in real photoscanned bark.... Six real Pacific Northwest species. The sun and moon sit where they really would at 49 degrees north in late September. Thunder arrives late because it travels at the speed of sound. Wolves stalk at dusk, circle the fire at night and back off from a torch. Claude Code split the world between waves of agents, one per domain, and critic agents that never touched the build checked the renders against real photos. 62 seconds of 4K, 1,881 frames, rendered one by one out of the game itself. The wolf is still the weakest thing in it and it doesnt hold 60 fps yet. I ran out of Claude usage before the realism pass finished. Its not even done.show more

If you can build this as an indie within a day, imagine what a good game studio with people dedicated to this full time and virtually unlimited token budgets can do.

thats the part that gets me, this was one person and one day

the 44k trees is where i'd pump the brakes. three.js without InstancedMesh at that count is a slideshow even on good hardware. did it actually use instancing, or just spawn 44k separate meshes?

fair push, it runs detail levels by distance with baked billboards for the far trees, and youre right that it doesnt hold 60 in the dense spots yet, thats the next pass

44k trees generated in code on a 2 km eroded island. In three.js. After one day of Opus 5.5. That number made me stop scrolling.

opus 5.5 has fixed the gap where opus 5 would only generate something good 1 in 50 times, now it can just do it every time it seems

Are you just lying here? You have to be making this up, or exaggerating, or something. You already had the assets built right? Either way, how did they get the axe? Would it not be better to have them find stone tools and make things from wood such as bow and arrow? That could be cool

not lying, every frame is rendered out of the game itself and the post says whats still weak, no prebuilt game assets, the world is generated in code and the outside stuff is free cc0 textures and recorded sound, the axe is the crash axe you loot from the plane, stone tools and a bow would fit since crafting is already in

Nice, you should definitely do a video of the process you used would be cool to have a go at building something myself

the island being simulated instead of sculpted is the real headline. erosion as code means you can reroll the whole island and every path still makes sense

yeah the erosion runs offline and bakes the island in, havent tried a reroll yet but thats a fun test

do it and post the reroll. if the paths still make sense on seed 2 that's the real flex

If 60 secs are enough for you to run out of usage then it's not good enough. With how much these subscriptions cost, you should be able to make a full game for 20 bucks/m, not just 60 seconds lol

this is a whole game the recording is 60 seconds

Man that’s insane. Just when I thought models were plateauing Anthropic gives us this

opus 5.5 has been a big jump on everything ive thrown at it so far

Very nice. It feels like we are maybe a year or two away from AAA games from a prompt. I’d be surprised if there is a GTA 7 from Rockstar. Not sure how big game studios are going to deal with this. What will Nintendo do? Maybe they can license beloved characters for people to use in the games they create themselves. It’s going to be a crazy next few years.

I want to see full version!

its not done yet, ran out of claude usage mid realism pass, more soon

Amazing! Looks great. 5.5 has really stepped things up. I'm working on something similar. 6x6km world with hydrology that goes from headwaters all the way to the ocean. You must fly fish to survive and gather gear to slowly venture further. I'm going for a Firewatch vibe.

Impressive that you got 44k trees and dynamic lighting in a day, curious how you handled instancing to keep frame rates viable

detail drops by distance and the far trees are billboards baked at load, frame rate is the weak spot right now, it doesnt hold 60 in the densest parts yet

Exactly, distance LOD and billboards become the bottleneck when you pack 44k trees.

Really cool, but it's sad how people call these things "full games". Useful to make full games, yes. But you have never played something real if you can't tell an interactive tech demo from a game.

This is amazing! It went over my head on my tests as well:

Why not just use unreal engine at this point

because its a browser test, no install and no engine, just three.js and whatever claude writes

Damn, The Forest, one of the best binge-play games for me :D

same, the forest is a classic, this is opus 5.5s take on it after one day

@grok how much does a project like this cost to make through opus 5.5. Double check your answer for accuracy and explain your answer

A survival game like The Forest in the browser is wild. Survival + atmosphere is my favorite combo, it's what Below 10,000 Meters is built on:

雷声姗姗来迟，因为它以声速传播这细节多数3A都懒得做

yeah claude went deep on the small stuff, the sun and moon are placed for 49 degrees north in late september too

This is absolutely not Three JS.

Stop producing fake news. This is all ready assets.

Thank you! Time to see the Opus 5.5 clout. No other model is even close at this point.

This. Is. Mind. Blowing!! 👏🤟🤯

When I see these absurd demo, I think are fake. There's often a huge gap between 1 req and other, and this is incredible, considering how be limited TreeJS and lack of help, libraries,and frameworks. "Making an uncomfortable comparison," it's more weight than an AA/AAA game demo

44k trees in the browser and it still runs?? how did you keep it smooth?

honestly it doesnt fully yet, the video is rendered frame by frame and the post says no 60 fps, near trees are full detail, distant ones drop detail and the far ones are billboards baked at load, perf pass is next

Show me 100x that terrain, multiplayer, with simulated rivers and lakes. Putting the windows dressing on 2k relatively static terrain is the easy part. Looks pretty though.

The critic agents checking renders against real photos is a strong detail: it turns visual realism into a feedback loop instead of relying on the builder’s eye alone.

How do you prompt for this and do you just use Claude code within the Claude app? Do you just tell Claude to write everything in three.js? Any assistance greatly appreciated.

claude code with opus 5.5, the prompt was basically build me a first person survival game in three.js so realistic you cant tell it isnt earth, then i told it the first pass was mediocre and it went and pulled real reference photos to fix it

Thanks. Much appreciated.

It's wonderful that it destroyed you but how much time and was it just one prompt or a lot of back-and-forth to get it just right

One and a half prompts we can say. First one was the build prompt then I told it to improve the textures sent out 50 or so subagents after 12 or so hours I stopped it due to usage.

This will have endless bugs and paper-cuts that will take you months, even years to smooth. Endless iterations. This is the problem with these tech-demos.

fair, its a tech demo right now and the post says its not done, one day to get here is the part worth paying attention to

@sippingsoma2 I really like the look of it. If you don't want to share the source for this one you should create another version with the basic similar environment and share with everyone how to achieve. A lot of post about astra /opus make it look like" look what I created in one shot!"

@sippingsoma2 I passed the files over to @webdevcody he's going to make a video and what ever changes he does to the source such as performance optimization etc that end result will be fully open source.

Reminds me of a LOST game

plane crash on an island with something in the woods, its very lost

It's definitely not just 3js

@Detgrim1

44k trees in a day is absurd, even before the erosion bit