The 1.4-MB FPS That Generates Everything: A Teardown of Saltline and an AI-Built Clone
Storing the rules for a scene instead of the scene itself can shrink a full game to a single HTML file, which changes what's practical for browser distribution and instant loading. The AI-assisted rebuild also shows that a small team can iterate quickly, but the line between "inspired by" and "copy" gets blurry when most of the code is generated by a model.
The entire game fits in 1.4 MB because it stores generation rules, not asset data. Models are built from geometric parameters, textures come from layered noise and rust algorithms, and every gunshot and rain pattern is synthesized audio. At startup, the browser expands those rules into meshes, textures, and sound buffers, then runs a full Three.js FPS with PCSS-style soft shadows, HDR tone mapping, and weather that reacts to shelter.
The 18-point teardown covers how the scene stays believable: wet ground transitions from damp to puddle with matching roughness and reflection changes, triplanar mapping removes the need for hand-made UVs, and contact shadows are computed separately from volumetric light and merged by depth. Even the mechanical dogs use paw-contact inverse kinematics, and enemies use A* with line-of-sight checks and last-known positions.
The author's own clone, Mist Harbor, started at 7.53 MiB with scanned textures, then dropped to 0.814 MiB after switching to procedural materials. The comparison highlights what procedural generation costs: smaller files but a heavier runtime load and a visual gap that no amount of code organization can close. The article ends by openly crediting the original Saltline work and inviting players to compare both games directly.
Procedural generation shifts the cost from disk to runtime; the first-frame load still has to build every mesh, texture, and audio buffer, so a small package doesn't mean a light process.
The comparison between scanned and procedural materials shows a real trade-off: scanned textures deliver surface detail fast but bloat the file and don't fix proportion or layout issues, so the choice depends on whether distribution size or art-director control matters more.
Attribution in AI-assisted development is a practical issue, not a legal one: the author had to correct the record that the received file was a localized Saltline build, and that borrowing gameplay and visual direction counts as dependence even when the code was rewritten.