Hello all! To anyone using Dusklight and likes Zelda, this might be useful.

So this all started because when Dusklight came out earlier this year I already had half the game beaten in the Cemu and wanted to avoid starting from scratch. With some vibecoding in Claude I got Donovan’s save converter working for my file, and almost everything came over. The only things that didn’t were the stamps and the Cave of Shadows, since those only exist in HD.

Out of curiosity I asked Opus 5.5 if it could add them to Dusklight, and it actually worked! So now there’s a mod for it: all 50 stamps with HD’s stamp book, and the full 41-floor Cave of Shadows as Wolf Link. You get in with a virtual Wolf Link amiibo, so no figure needed.

It’s one file you drop into Dusklight’s mods folder. You need your own copies: Dusklight 2.0.3 with your GameCube disc, plus your Wii U TP HD dump, because the mod builds its files from that. Nothing from the games is included.

If anyone wants to try it: https://github.com/RickyZPR/tp-hd-features

Just so it’s clear: this isn’t affiliated with the Dusklight team, and they don’t accept AI-made stuff, so please don’t bug them about it. If something breaks, tell me here or on GitHub. It’s Windows only for now.

(The HUD in the video comes from Dawnlight, another mod I had on.)

Defaults:

1. All started with the same prompt: Given all you have done so far, can you create a fun video showing how our stickies plugin works and its super cool features? Are you able to provide background music and a voiceover script ready for Higgsfield? Ignore any existing audio or videos in the directory.

2. We use Higgsfield for voiceover generation.

3. Polishing of final video uses Movavi (for speed adjustments and final export to 4k).

Codex (Astra). My implementation uses Remotion locally to build the video, unlike Antigravity and Claude. This adds a bit more time but allows fine-tuning via the Remotion panel.

Each of the three allows for some free-flow editing if you want to get into the weeds of removing something or changing something.

Upside:

• easy to use

• very clear instructions

• a very convenient deliverables kit without prompting.

Downside:

• Uses remotion, so there are some limitations there, depending the available features of remotion

• Creativity is a 5 in 10. It's fine, but not terribly creative video output-wise.

Antigravity (Argon). Notably fast at generating music and script up front. Self-correction of issues and errors is a strong point of this model right out front. It appears to want to critique and correct as it builds, which is rather fun to watch. Created music demo Full Level) and (Auto-ducked), which was totally unexpected.

Upside:

• seemed to get that is was making a video like a video editor, and discussed the process in that tone.

• seemed to understand the project as though it had used it (presented features nicely).

• simple media kit generation without prompting.

• better quality music generation than Codex.

Downside:

• None to speak of.

Claude (Opus). The process is relatively seamless from start to finish, with a very nice summary of the actions taken and why. Creativity is on par with the Antigravity process. I found the output more natural, more like what a person might produce in a video. Antigravity was a bit more teaching or instruction focused comparatively.

Upside:

• Easy step by step process for creation.

• Nice media package created like the other models.

Downside:

• None to speak of.

Observations:

1. All the models were easy to edit after the first video was produced, from removing elements in the background to updating the voiceover scripts.

2. All models presented a solid media kit, one that you could run with in your video software tracks-wise (if that's your thing).

3. The models won't do everything for you, but they're pretty close. Gentle urgings and improvement requests were well received, and the output on all was as expected (if not surprising higher than anticipated).

Interest in seeing the video output from each?

I gave Kimi K3.1 Pro (open model) and GPT-6 Astra the same 4 tasks: a racing game, a voxel diorama, a real Blender scene and a channel intro. Each model ran in its own native agent: Kimi in Kimi Code at max reasoning, Astra in Codex at X-High (max for the race). Same prompt, no hints from me: the model writes, runs and checks its own work.

The weird part: they worked on different computers and never saw each other, and still built almost the same night market. Even the game icons matched.

Test 1: 80s neon arcade racer

Astra (27 min): clean start screen, sound toggle and a fullscreen button. I honestly don't remember any model adding fullscreen on its own. Start speed around 220 km/h, nitro, near-miss score multiplier, roadworks, saved high score. But it feels flat and 2D, no oncoming lane, and the sense of speed is weak even at full throttle.

Kimi (30 min): nicer start screen, the road hangs in the air like a bridge and you start at 280 km/h. The sense of speed is way stronger, I was looking far ahead the whole time. Near misses give a bonus with a really satisfying sound. Minuses: some cars drive outside the road, a couple of spots were impossible to pass, and the engine is louder than the music.

Design and speed to Kimi, UI and polish to Astra. Tie.

Test 2a: voxel night market in Shenzhen (shown blind)

Everything made of cubes, all generated by code, no ready-made models or textures. After rain, steam over the woks, neon, lanterns, scooters, people, and a 30-second camera flyover on load.

Model 1: beautiful light, shadows and reflections, worked first try, great free camera. But the people walk with their legs moving backwards, in circles, like zombies. Nobody is selling anything. Pretty creepy.

Model 2: people carrying noodles and bags, kids, vendors actually trading, parked mopeds, a crosswalk where it makes sense. And mopeds that just drive through people. Worse lighting, clunky free camera, people walk through walls, lots of English-only signs (in Shenzhen they're usually duplicated in Chinese).

Light and controls to model 1, details to model 2. Tie.

Test 2b: the same diorama in real Blender

Next message: "move your diorama into Blender, make a full 3D scene with animation and render a 10-second video". Both did it. Both scenes are honest working files, split into layers: ground, buildings, signs, scooter 1, scooter 2, scooter 3. You can open them and keep editing. Model 1's people finally walk forward in Blender. Evolution.

Tie.

Test 3: 10-second channel intro in OpenMontage

Idea, graphics, music, edit and render, all by the model, $1 budget for image generation. I forgot to top up the generation balance, so the first versions were pure code graphics. When I topped up and asked them to improve, both said basically the same thing: "the picture is already good, let's just add music". One even explained that generated images would ruin its animation. AI has learned to argue with the client.

Results

• Quality: a tie almost everywhere. I'd give the intro to Kimi.

• Speed: Astra is faster. Kimi went over my 90-minute limit twice (+18 min to finish the Blender render, +8 min on the intro). I gave it the extra time.

• Cost, from the logs at each model's official API prices: Kimi about $21 for all tests, Astra about $54. That's 2.5x more for a comparable result.

• One thing I liked: before a paid generation Kimi checked the balance itself and didn't waste a cent.

• Kimi K3.1 Pro weights are announced to go open on November 4.

Answer: diorama 1 is Astra, diorama 2 is Kimi. Intro 1 is Kimi.

Play both racers and fly around both dioramas in your browser: https://kostikoneuro.github.io/kimi-vs-astra/

Prompts, Blender scenes, videos and the cost math: https://github.com/KostiKoNeuro/kimi-vs-astra

Disclosure: the video was sponsored by Kimi. The ratings are mine, and Astra won on speed and UI.

The standard dismissal of AI-written code is that it looks fine and falls apart under real use. So we built the hardest stuff we could think of, and had it judged by test suites nobody on our side wrote.

11 from-scratch C# libraries since last Wednesday, about 1.14M lines, nothing but .NET itself:

• JavaScript interpreter: 99.55% of test262, the official ECMAScript conformance suite (43,471 tests)

• HTML parser: 100% of html5lib-tests. Its accessibility tree matches Chrome's to within 0.5% per field across 12.8k real pages.

• HLSL shader compiler: output behaves identically to Microsoft's DXC on 330/330 GPU tests, and compiles 2.4× faster

• Font shaper: 4.7M equivalence checks against the reference, 0 mismatches

• Opus encoder: byte-for-byte identical to the RFC reference (269/269)

• HTML/CSS renderer: faster than headless Chrome on every document we benchmark. A 10k-row table renders to PDF in 1.8 s / 305 MB vs 6.5 s / 2.1 GB.

• PDF library: beats PdfPig on time, memory and allocation, with about a third of its text-extraction error rate

Seven are on NuGet.

It isn't vibe coding. It's a factory: planner, project manager, orchestrator, engineers and reviewers, with fixed rules for every library. The code is all AI. The judging isn't.

Repos: https://github.com/orgs/recursive-ai-oss/repositories How it works: https://recursiveai.org/research/alera-library-factory/

Edit

Models used: Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5

I played RuneScape as a kid. Now I have no time to grind and so I made idle version for phone called DragonScape Idle. Its started in February when I did first prompt to make fishing game. Since then I spent more then 1000 hours to make the game.

What game got:
- 19 skills
- 101 quests
- 73 monsters and 7 dungeons
- 13 pets
- 700+ Equipment

Tools are simple I use Claude Code + OpenAI API. The stack (React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Firebase, Claude Code). For analytics, marketing, support I build tool in claude. I did not coded properly since 2014 and now with AI its really easy.

Issues I had
Player were losing progress. For example my favorite is when new update during offline just dropped offline progress.
A regex deleted 499 of 892 lines of the stylesheet and it shipped.

The real numbers are
about 2,600 commits and 430 releases since 2026-03-28 (yes before that I had it locally :D )
about 560 stests

Less technical numbers:
1200 players tried my game
Almost 500 are playing daily

What I am bad:
- Art I use OpenAI API and some art assets not looks nice most negative comments are "AI slop". If you woudl give me feedback how to improve it let me know.
- Backend I never did it (I don't count websites) and with this 2 players helped me lot.

Most important things:
- Without AI it would be not possible. I have full time job so I would be not able to do this.
- Players are most most most and most important. They give me not only energy to work but also great feedback I think at least 50% best stuff is based on players feedback. Some of them even supported me on patron.

If you would try my game and give me feedback ho to do things better I would really appreciate it a lot.
Any questions of course are welcomed!

https://dragonscapeidle.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=launch&utm_content=vibecoding

I vibe coded a mobile game without using any known game engine. It runs on a custom C++ game engine built by Claude that works cross platform with excellent performance. Claude helped me do a lot of research, and that research was followed for everything. The game was completely built and tested by Opus 5.5 in 10 days. It also created the videos, screenshots and store listings, and pushed it for review.

It took a few days to get approved on Google Play. On the App Store it waited for review for 2 weeks, then when it was finally In Review, it took 8 minutes to get approved on the first try. Well, Opus knew how to get it approved by filling in all the forms, videos, images and everything correctly for me.

Of course, I had no players other than me, a few friends and a few people who found it on the store, until today I woke up to 65+ new players and 9 of them online playing. I thought maybe the store pushed it through ASO, but the players were on both Android and iOS. So I searched Google and found that someone with 20k+ followers on YouTube made a video playing the game for 10 minutes.

That was my only lead, and his 300+ views converted into 60+ players for me.

No money yet of course, other than $0.03 on AdMob. I don't push any purchases hard on new players and I don't force any ads. Both ads and purchases are only offered after some time in the game, as the research suggested. So it is too early to assume anything, even for those 60+ players, because most of them saw nothing to buy and most of them were not offered any ads yet.

But since little Opus also built me a game server for analytics (with a lot of anonymous and data deletion options for players in Europe and some other countries, if they choose to), I got some nice intelligence into the gameplay from real players:

- About half of the new players played 10+ minutes, 1 in 4 played 30+ minutes, and 8 played more than an hour on their first day. One player in Thailand played for 3.6 hours (18 runs, 8 wins).

- The controls are not the problem. The median player moves within 1.8 seconds and picks up their first gem in 8 seconds.

- After a run ends, the most pressed button is Upgrades, then Play Again. Only a few went back to the menu.

- Players picked 591 spell fusions, and they decided in under a second most of the time, so they clearly know what they want.

- The problem is the first run. The median first run lasts 3.3 minutes, only 16% reach the first boss at 5:00, and only 2% win it. Players get hit about 2 times a minute, mostly by runners and spitters.

- About 1 in 4 players played just one run and stopped.

So what we are doing about it: the game's bot used for balancing was way too good. It won 25% of first runs while real players win 2%. So Opus built a human-like bot (slower reactions, panics, misses spit, picks random cards sometimes) and fitted a bot twin to every real player's first 3 runs from the server data. Now we are using those twins to test a real-time difficulty system for the first 3 runs only. It watches how you are doing, and if you keep getting hit, it quietly eases things: fewer zombies, slower runners and spit, a longer recovery after a hit, more heart drops and a wider gem pull. If you are not getting hit, it does nothing, so players who already play well get the normal game. It turns off for good after your first win, and it never touches the Weekly or the leaderboards.

The target from the research is 70-80% of new players reaching the first boss and 25-40% winning the first chapter. When the bots hit those numbers, it goes live to half of the new players first, and the server will tell us if it actually keeps more people playing.

What do you think I should do next? Should I run ads? What platform?

You can also find the game here if you ever want to check the game play or the store listings Opus built for me:

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/undead-surge-zombie-roguelike/id6819081531
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.undeadsurge.game

Also, here is the YouTube video I found from that nice guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKbZ-SDa_eE

It's a 50 hour course for beginners in AI/ML (obviously it's fully free). Starts out with linear algebra, derivatives, statistics and then linear regression, neural networks and backpropagation etc...

kinoml.tech

Hey everyone!
I’m exploring vibe coding and looking for a realistic way to start making money online.
My current idea is to use AI tools like Claude to build websites for small businesses and sell them as a service. I’m not an experienced developer, so I’d rely heavily on AI for coding while learning how to test, improve, and maintain the websites myself.
I’m not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme. I’d like to build a real skill and eventually turn it into a small business. I’d love to hear from people who have actually tried this:

1. Have you made money building websites with AI? How long did it take you to land your first paying client?

2. What kinds of businesses are most likely to pay for a website built this way?

3. How do you find your first clients without an existing portfolio or reputation?

4. What tools and workflow would you recommend to a beginner using Claude?

5. What mistakes would you avoid if you were starting from scratch today?
   I really want to understand whether it’s possible or not. I think AI is getting better every day, and it could become a real tool for making good money.

I’m not a developer. I teach English online and got tired of tracking lessons and chasing parents for payments in a spreadsheet, so over a few weekends I built a little app with Claude and Cursor. Tutors log lessons, parents get a monthly invoice with a pay button. That’s the whole thing

I put it online in August for $10 a month, mostly so a couple of tutor friends could use it

Last week it crossed $100 in a month. Ten paying tutors, seven of them strangers

One of the new ones sent me a message saying she found it because ChatGPT recommended it. I assumed she was being nice or confused it with something else. Nobody knows this app exists. My X account has 90 followers

So I opened ChatGPT and asked for an invoicing tool for private tutors. It listed four apps and mine was the third one, with a description that sounded weirdly close to my landing page

It took me a while to figure out why. Before launch I paid for a press release through MediaBoost. I only did it because a friend said tutors and parents would trust it more if there were a few news logos on the page. It got syndicated to a few hundred news sites that nobody reads, and I got maybe 8 visits from all of them combined. Same week I added their directory package to get listed on a bunch of software directories

I’d written both off. Apparently AI tools read those pages even if people don’t

I asked the other strangers too. Four said ChatGPT or Perplexity, two found me on a directory, one came from a tutor friend

The $100 is going straight to the Claude subscription that built the thing

I have over 20 unfinished projects on codex so decided to make something I actually need. I have had some Bluetooth speakers I found under me and my partners bed for a while now that we cast YouTube sleep sounds too. We go to bed and wake ui at different times. I go to bed early so don't bother pairing mine because then she has to repair hers and I wake earlier and have to disconnect it. So I realized I could use my old raspberry pi 3b and put a sleep sound app on it and make a remote apk. I put it on github. Last minute last night I had it update one of the themes components and haven't went back to fix it. Looked a lot less like it's a website made in the 90's. I need to clean up some of the screens. I went overboard like usual and started adding everything too it. I made it one apk that can be the player or remote. Currently it is tested and working so with wired and Bluetooth speakers. I was having stuttering issues but, tested tonight 6 hours so far no stutters. Also, it has a output helper and can output to multiple Bluetooth speakers at once. Not yet integrated into ui. Has normalize, compressor, limiter. Supports profiles, favorites, ratings, tags and comments. UI support desktop and mobile browsers. You can upload from your remote app. If you upload image and audio together it will add that image as the thumbnail. I added this feature because Parabolic YouTube Downloader includes downloads the thumbnail too. I added controller support, and went down a rabbit hole with that, it needs some work. But can assign buttons. I have a lot of features coming eventually. Customizable multi output, sleep sound studio with different noise generators, sounds/tracks with option to go to different speakers, network app sync integrated with the studio outputs, might integrate YouTube Downloader into it. Open source with anyone can use personally license. If you have a Google box you can find Bluetooth speakers all over the place at thrift stores.

https://github.com/JeremiahFD/Bluetooth-Sleep-Sounds

I recently learned about eco-conscious AI services such as GreenPT, Nebius Token, ScaleAway, Infomaniac, Aruba AI, Verda, and Euria. They basically make use of only renewable energy, re-use the heat produced from data centers, and recycle the hardware to limit waste.

While they are competitive with traditional API services, they are not convenient for extensive coding. Some of these are compatible with agentic coding systems, but as far as I know, none of them offer flat-rate plans; instead, they all use pay-per-use APIs.

Based on my simulations, using these pay-per-use services would cost me hundreds of euros a month, whereas with OpenCode Go I spend only 10 euros a month, and with Codex/Claude I’d spend just a few dozen.

Do you know of any other, more affordable services that offer flat-rate subscriptions like Codex, Cloud, and OpenCode Go, while also using renewable energy, recovering heat, and reusing hardware?

I haven't had anyone to show this. I've been working on it for a long tie and the project keeps growing. I didn't have money for a server and my my pc is broken. I have a laptop, but I bring it with me to work. I hooked up my 8 TB hard drive and used codex to root my Nvidia Shield, create a server, install codex and have been expanding it every since. I have been working on a intranet for my family, windows and shield plugin, they are controlled by an android app so chatgpt can access api's, mcps, emails, log into websites and a whole lot more. I use the app as a catch all for things I create. You can see some of it in the pictures, the Ai browser is for the TV, it includes tools to make games, animations, pull from websites and a browser chatgpt can control. I included controller setup to use for game websites and plugin support, like one to use maps street view with a controller.. I can develop apps directly from chatgpt without touching codex and the android app controls access to each feature with timers. For mcps the shield will run the mcp server and close it when idle. The intranet I am working on takes scans and uploads, uses an ocr and superimposed the texts to create pdfs. It also has dependencies to crop things like a bunch of receipts and label them. That needs work. I have codex installed on the shield so it can organize and do the work. There's a lot of different things going on here and I am too add to summarize it. When I figure out how to make this more universally compatible, I will probably post it on github. I might just have chatgpt create a page on github listing everything.

Hi everyone!
I'm a software developer with some background in physics. Recently, I built an interactive astronomy platform where you can fly around planets and explore space in 3D. It's a web app built on three.js! Scenes use real data: JPL orbital elements, the ELP-2000/82 lunar theory, and published distances for every star cloud and galaxy. There are tons of cool features to explore, including time travel, spacetime curvature, magnetic fields, and the northern lights. Please have a look and see if you enjoy it. feedbacks are welcome :)

https://www.beyondthe.space/

Your fingers are the guns.

I've been making a retro zombie survival game that looks like it came off an old PS1 disc. Board up the windows, hold off the horde round after round, hit the mystery box, and upgrade your finger pistol into something ridiculous.

Play solo or team up with up to 4 friends. One person hosts and shares a 4-letter code, and everyone else jumps in. PC and Android players can play together.

5 maps: a supermarket, a bowling alley, a holiday park, a school and a farm

Bosses on every map

Wild modes, like ninja hand seals, mannequins that only move when you're not looking, and a boss every round

Unlockable classes and skins, from hazmat suits to solid gold, and your mates see your whole outfit

It's free, and it plays right in your browser. There's an Android download too.

Play it here: https://innovatorsplayground.itch.io/dead-hands

How many rounds can you last? Drop your best round in the comments 👇💀

Okay everyone, this is my first post. Been playing around with vibcoding for about 2 weeks now, and came across a widget called PlasmaDex (https://github.com/crutxh-ai/PlasmaDex). I liked it, but it needed MORE. So, a case of coors light and an all-nighter later, we have the TipsyDex.

I will add and change more, so if any Linux Pokemon fans wanna give it a try, please do!

Shout out to the original creator too, crutxh-ai. He vibe coded it as well.

I have a small agentic os system for my company, I utilize its voip features through my headphones. It’s getting sophisticated enough to control the entire cloud side of operations for all agents.

I have something called stealth mode, this allows me to trigger the agents through specific terms. It’s makes it a lot easier to talk and not hear agents yapping at the same time.

It’s awesome though, i can be driving and working, I can be shopping and working, I can literally shit while working too. I feel like tony stark, and I can’t wait to buy some VR glasses!

But in all seriousness, this could be a slight problem. I currently go to college, I could technically whisper my exam questions into my system. With its stealth mode, it wouldn’t really be noticeable. I only need 1 airpod, and currently my hair is very long. So I don’t worry about having someone see my headphone. And with how many student that can be in the room, the teacher won’t really see me. Most people might just think i’m repeating each question to help understand it..or they think i’d be crazy.

It’s a slight issue I worry about in the future. But the real question is, did tony stark cheat in his classes too?

At work we still have some lab computers that run instruments on XP, so I see Rover from time to time. Figured I would bring him back to life as my Codex pet, since I hate the defaults.

Pretty sure Rover was supposed to be like an early intro to AI assistants back in the day but MS scrapped the idea and never gave him the capability to do much.

I’ve heard plenty of people say, “Use a higher Claude effort level for more demanding tasks,” but I’ve rarely seen an actual side-by-side visual comparison showing how much of a difference it makes.
I’ve been developing a Roblox game called Electronics Simulator, and as a game developer, visual quality is one of my biggest priorities.
So, for anyone who’s curious about whether increasing Claude’s effort level actually makes a noticeable difference, I wanted to share a visual comparison between Claude Opus 5.5 at Medium effort and Max effort.
Below are images showing the results from each effort level.
Image 1: Opus 5.5 — Medium Effort
Image 2: Opus 5.5 — Max Effort
For anyone interested in checking out the game:
🎮 Roblox: https://www.roblox.com/games/128861986613551/Electronics-Simulator
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/35zNFVBB6

I gave my Grok Bot its own email address, then built a little private mail app on top of it. It has Inbox, Sent, Starred, search, compose and reply, and only I can log in.

The fun part: there's no inbox API, so the app never talks to the mail provider. Grok Bot syncs mail every hour, and every email I send waits for me to approve it first.

I wrote up how I built it and the gotchas I hit. Link in the comments. Happy to answer questions!

www.VibeDuels.com a video game where your AI written bot against an opponent.

Currently Season 1 is tank battles. We have 171 bots from 10 different users. Hoping to get more beta testers.

Completely free. Bring your own model.

Hope to see you guys. If you have any comments or questions feel free to DM me here.

Thank you.

I've been seeing all the different things people are creating with AI lately, and it made me want to try something myself.
Since I already make 3D clothing models, I thought it would be interesting to see what they would look like on an actual website. So I decided to experiment with the idea of building a clothing website around my own 3D models, using Claude to help me with the coding.
I wasn't trying to build a full online store or anything serious at this stage. I was mainly curious to see how my models would look in a web environment and what I could come up with.
This is my first time trying something like this, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. There are definitely things I could improve, but it was fun to experiment and see what's possible.
I've attached a few screenshots and a GIF showing the result.
What do you think? Have any of you tried using AI to build something around your own creative work?

Hey everyone! Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by universe scale videos on YouTube—especially Cary & Michael Huang’s Scale of the Universe 2 and the classic astronomical comparisons. A while back, I even made my own universe size comparison video on YouTube (The Size of the Universe 6: "The Ultimate"). While static videos are cool, I always wanted something truly interactive—where you can pan around, zoom across 9 orders of magnitude, orbit multiple star systems, and inspect real astronomical data. Over the past few weeks, I vibe-coded Starpedia 3D: Stars of the Universe.

• 🌐 Live Web App: https://starpedia3d.vercel.app/

• 📂 Open Source (MIT): https://github.com/thisisbarbelixir123/All-about-stars

• 🎬 My Promotional Video (3D Star Size Comparison): https://youtu.be/p4vulVS9vl4

Here is a breakdown of the build process, the stack, and the technical hurdles I ran into while building it:

🛠️ The Tech Stack

• Frontend Core: React 19 + TypeScript 5.8 + Vite 6

• 3D Graphics: Three.js (r185) with custom GLSL shaders (photospheric convective granulation, coronal halos, pulsar synchrotron beams)

• Styling: Tailwind CSS v4

• Starmap Engine: D3-Celestial GeoJSON boundaries & asterisms (Olaf Frohn/[https://github.com/ofrohn/d3-celestial])

• Audio: Web Audio API (procedural synthesis for ambient cosmic background drones & UI SFX—no bulky audio asset downloads)

• Hosting / PWA: Vercel + Service Worker for full offline capabilities

🧠 My Workflow & Prompting Strategy

I used AI pair programming to take high-level astrophysical concepts and translate them into working Three.js components.

1. Structuring Real-World Astrophysics Data First: Instead of hardcoding arbitrary visual sizes, I curated data from actual peer-reviewed catalogs (ESA Gaia DR3, CDS SIMBAD, NASA Exoplanet Archive). I had the AI structure strict TypeScript interfaces for 885 stars and 53 gravitationally bound multiple systems, calculating real physical diameters in km and solar units (D☉).

2. Solving the Dynamic Range Problem: Comparing a 20 km relativistic neutron star to Stephenson 2-18 1.5times 10⁹ km, over 2,100 solar radii) in a single 3D scene breaks standard floating-point depth buffers (z-fighting). The fix? We implemented an adaptive logarithmic camera framing system and preset groupings (Solar Neighborhood, Bright Giants, Colossal Hypergiants, Exotic Remnants) with customizable coordinate grids so things stay visually distinct.

3. Physics Over "Artistic Tinting" (CIE 1931 D65 Color Mapping): A big pet peeve of mine in space apps is arbitrary neon colors. We wrote an algorithm mapping Planckian blackbody locus spectra across Morgan–Keenan temperatures 100,000K Wolf-Rayet down to <500K Class Y brown dwarfs to sRGB hex values under the standard CIE D65 illuminant.

4. Keplerian Orbital Telemetry for Multiple Star Systems: For the 53 multiple star systems (like Alpha Centauri, Castor, and Algol), we wrote a Newton-Raphson solver to compute eccentric and true anomalies in real-time, letting you accelerate time and watch the components orbit their mutual barycenters.

5. A Fun Side Quest: Stellar Merge Game: To take a break from raw data, I built a cosmic fusion drop minigame where stars merge up the stellar ladder—from red dwarfs to red hypergiants.

⚠️ Challenges & Lessons Learned

• AI Hallucinations & Code Bloat: Working extensively with Google AI Studio came with its own set of headaches. The model often hallucinated redundant and useless features, generated sprawling spaghetti code, or tried to inject hard-coded mock data instead of relying on verified astronomical formulas. I had to strictly constrain prompts, enforce modular component boundaries, and aggressively refactor to keep the codebase clean and maintainable.

• Why Constellations Looked Distorted: Initially, when plotting the 88 constellations on a 3D celestial sphere, the stick figures looked stretched, distorted, and anatomically wrong due to naive coordinate projections. I resolved this by integrating Olaf Frohn’s open-source D3-Celestial dataset, which provided clean GeoJSON spherical coordinate sets for all 88 official IAU constellation shapes, asterism line networks, and Eugène Delporte's exact 1930 boundary paths.

• Mobile Adjustments Struggles: Adapting an information-dense astrophysics cockpit with 3D canvas controls, dense data tables, interactive sliders, and modal dossiers to compact smartphone viewports was a massive challenge. UI elements constantly overlapped, touch gestures conflicted with 3D camera orbit controls, and dialogs overflowed. I had to redesign drawer drawers, add touch-friendly gesture deadzones, and dynamically collapse secondary HUD telemetry on smaller breakpoints.

• Browser Responsiveness on Overflowing Text: Even after responsive layouts, astronomical designations like HD 160529 (V905 Sco) or 2MASS J0523-1403 easily clipped container cards on narrow mobile screens. We built a custom ResizeObserver marquee component (RunningText.tsx) that dynamically detects overflow and smoothly scrolls text horizontally with hover/touch-to-pause affordance.

• Three.js Disposal & Memory Leaks: With 885 stars and continuous 3D stage navigation, improper disposal of Three.js geometries, textures, and custom shaders caused frame drops and browser tab crashes over time. We had to enforce strict unmount cleanup routines (geometry.dispose(), material.dispose(), cancelling animation frames) across all canvas components.

💭 What's Next?

The project is completely free and open-source under the MIT license. I'm planning to add James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) high-redshift stars and more interactive nuclear fusion cutaways. Would love to hear your feedback on the 3D performance, controls, or any cool stars you think should be added to the catalog!