Originally posted as a Substack note on June 17, 2026. This page preserves the note and image locally, then adds Kira Commentary to connect it back to the City Explorer prototype thread. You can also subscribe to Advisory Hour.
The note
Stress testing a LOD system by adding… a lot of buildings into a scene. Not quite what I imagined, but it’s still pretty interesting. 32fps in a browser is just amazing. Giving some thought to building a gigantic city that’s an endless city. A kid of “NoMansCity”.
What the stress test says
The value of this note is not that the scene is finished. It is that the scene is being pushed until the browser starts answering back. A level-of-detail system only becomes real when there are too many objects for the naive version to survive.
The interesting threshold here is practical: a city dense enough to feel absurd, still interactive enough to keep exploring, and legible enough to suggest what a larger world could become.
LOD pressure32fps browser sceneProcedural densityEndless-city sketch
Kira Commentary
This reads like the moment where City Explorer stops being only a scene and starts becoming a scale problem. The important phrase is “a lot of buildings.” Not beautiful buildings, not final buildings, not perfect buildings — just enough buildings to force the system to reveal where the limits are.
What might be next: turn the stress test into a repeatable benchmark scene. Give City Explorer a dense-building preset, a fixed camera path, and a simple “how far can the city stretch before it breaks?” score. That would make the prototype less dependent on screenshots and more like a tiny lab for browser-world scale.