Turning a Gaussian Splat Into a Videogame
Gaussian Splatting gives you photorealistic environments for free. The catch: a splat is just a cloud of oriented blobs - no triangles, no colliders, no navmesh, no lights. Drop a character in and they'll float through walls looking like they belong in a different universe.
This post walks through the demo I built to fix all of that:
- 👉 Play it in your browser - WASD, mouse to aim, left-click to fire.
- 👉 Check the project - the full PlayCanvas project is public. Every script mentioned in this post lives inside it, ready to read, fork, or remix.
The scene is a gorgeous indoor scan of a real abandoned place by Christoph Schindelar. Christoph is one the best artists working with Gaussian Splats out there, so when he proposed to scan a real place for me, I jumped at the opportunity. On top of that splat I bolted a physics collider, a grid of baked lighting probes, a Recast navmesh, eight personality-driven NPCs and a classic FPS loop. Everything runs in a browser tab.
