I’ve been working on KILN, a browser-based tool for reducing heavy GLB models. It runs locally, so your files never leave your computer.

You drop in a model, choose a target, compare the original and optimized versions, then export the result. It preserves the textures and can also handle multipart and animated models. For the best quality, I recommend optimizing before rigging and animating. Animated models require the tool to protect bones, skin weights and moving parts, which limits how aggressively the geometry can be reduced.

I tested it against Meshy using the same models and triangle targets. On the models I tried, KILN kept noticeably more detail. I’ve also tested it with openly licensed models from around the internet, not just assets prepared for these examples.

These are real results from the models I’ve been testing. I’m preparing an early-access release now and would appreciate honest feedback, does this look useful to you?

I’m planning to release it soon, but I’d like to get some honest feedback first.

I’m planning to release it soon, but I’d like to get some honest feedback first. The first 100 people will be able to get it for $30 instead of $40, so if you’re interested, leave a comment below and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

One-time purchase, no subscription or recurring fees. Pay once and use KILN whenever you need it!

I will post the source code on my github soon enough if you guys are interested. Pretty impressed with what Sol achieved here with some help from me.

Edit:

Github: https://github.com/vengeful180-dot/0ad-optimized/releases/tag/v0.1.0

Installation

1. Download all three .7z parts into the same folder.
2. Open .7z.001 with 7-Zip and extract everything.
3. Open the extracted folder.
4. Double-click Play Optimized 0 A.D..bat.

Windows x64 and Vulkan only have been tested so far.

I’m building my own voxel engine, and I’ve made a lot of upgrades over the past few days, with plenty more still to come.

What do you guys think of the graphics? Do they catch your attention at all?

This little build was mainly made to test the engine’s systems and base-building mechanics. The idea for the game is that monsters will come out of the water and attack you and your base, destroying it chunk by chunk.

You’ll have to build defenses and prepare however you want. You could build a villa in a quiet corner of the island, make a bunker, create a fortress, or just experiment and build whatever comes to mind.

The engine already has fully working multiplayer. I’m also planning to add a lot more weapons, upgrades, building pieces, and different chunks to play around with.

This is running at 4K on max settings with TAA and 8x MSAA on a 7900 XT, but it should also run comfortably on much weaker hardware, including integrated GPU's.

Is this a bug? What can I even do about it?

It's still pretty early, but it's already handy for putting together just about any kind of weapon. Everything sits on a 32x32 grid, so the items can get surprisingly detailed if you've actually got an eye for pixel art (which I don't, lol). You can also test them instantly in the arena which is basically an empty map for now, with some sheeps and birds to hit. I'm planning to also add an advanced animation system so you guys can animate your attacks easily and however you want them to be.

I'll push it to my GitHub once I'm done tweaking it.

Full honesty up front, since that's the interesting part for this sub: I didn't write most of this. Claude (Opus) and Fable did basically all of the actual coding. My job was to point at things — "the shadows flicker here," "this looks wrong," "do X next," "not good enough, redo it" — playtest, and make the calls. Director and QA more than programmer.

What they built is a voxel engine from scratch. No Unity, no Unreal, no libraries — just C++ and raw OpenGL. What it does:

• Generates a big procedural world in code — terrain, biomes, caves, castles, villages, creatures. No asset files at all, which is why the whole game is ~1 MB. It's code, not generated art — every pixel is drawn by shaders the models wrote.

• Renders it with a modern graphics stack built piece by piece: raymarched volumetric clouds you can fly through, cascaded shadow maps with soft contact-hardening (PCSS) shadows, screen-space water reflection + refraction, temporal AA, SSAO, god rays, and a dynamic day/night cycle with a volumetric sky.

• Streams chunks with level-of-detail to draw ~450 chunks to the horizon while keeping the whole world in memory. Multithreaded generation + meshing; runs smooth on an RX 7900 XT.

The part that still surprises me is how much of the genuinely hard stuff — the renderer architecture, the shader math, GPU-driver bugs that took days to corner — the models handled once I could describe the symptom clearly. Knowing what "good" looks like and where it's broken turned out to be most of my value.

You can actually play it https://github.com/vengeful180-dot/LumenFall/releases/tag/v0.22 . Happy to talk about the workflow, how the models handled engine-level code, or where they struggled — ask me anything.

Two things people always ask:

• It's tiny (a couple MB) — that's not a stub. The whole game is a custom C++/OpenGL engine with zero external libraries, and every texture, biome, creature and world is generated procedurally in code. There are no asset files to ship, so it all fits in one small .exe.

• It's a single self-contained .exe — no installer, no dependencies, no telemetry. Scan it if you like. Windows may throw a SmartScreen warning since it isn't code-signed (normal for small indie builds) — just click More info → Run anyway.

Youtube high quality video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMrI2OrWypI

I’ve been building LUMENFALL, a custom C++ / OpenGL voxel game prototype.

It has procedural terrain, huge render distances with LOD chunk streaming, real-time cascaded shadows, water, foliage, bloom, SSAO, TAA/MSAA, saves, UI, entities, and generated visuals without needing a big asset pack.

The wild part: the latest build runs around 130 FPS average at 4K, with 4x MSAA + TAA and 256 chunk render distance** maxed out on my machine: RX 7900 XT + Ryzen 5900X.

It’s still early and rough in places, but I’m pretty much out of tokens for now. Fable is a monster!

Here’s the game if anyone wants to try it:

https://github.com/vengeful180-dot/LumenFall/releases/tag/v0.21

Been messing around with a Godot space scene and finally got this black hole feeling decent enough. Still tuning it tho, how does it look? Should I change something? PS: No sound yet. I’ve only been working on this for like 2 days, so it’s still rough.

Hello guys, I’ve been working on a sci-fi tower defense game where the main focus is making each turret feel like it has its own personality.

Instead of simple +damage upgrades, turrets branch into different paths: lightning chains, piercing shots, lava zones, freezing fields, crit builds, bombardment, and other stuff that changes how they play. I’m trying to make the game feel punchy and satisfying, with big visual feedback, chunky upgrades, and waves that slowly turn into chaos.

It’s still early and I’m polishing a lot, but I’d love to hear what people think.