NOCTURNE: Red-eye flights for the

Steer an endless night-flight over a procedural city. NOCTURNE is a night-flight airline for insomniacs. An infinite procedural city passes beneath the wing. Steer with your mouse. Built by Samin Sami.

I built this project to test Steer an endless night-flight over a procedural city. NOCTURNE is a night-flight airline for insomniacs. An infinite procedural city passes beneath the wing. Steer with your mouse. Built by Samin Sami. The core engineering challenge was sustaining uncompromised 60 FPS rendering using Three.js (GLB 3D) while handling continuous user interaction without framework overhead.

WHAT I WAS TESTING: I focused on two core engineering benchmarks:

Precision implementation of infinite world under continuous interactive user input

Sustained 60 FPS render performance and zero-dependency browser execution

THE TECHNICAL SIDE: Engineered directly in the browser with Three.js (GLB 3D), Canvas2D, Infinite world. The application runs without third-party frameworks or build-step dependencies, using hardware-accelerated rendering and custom event loops to achieve zero-latency response. Everything executes in the browser using Three.js (GLB 3D), Canvas2D, Infinite world. No third-party frameworks, no heavy runtime bundles, and zero external tracking.

WHAT I LEARNED: Balancing the mathematical rigors of infinite world with tactile browser interaction required tuning event throttling and memory allocation to eliminate all garbage collection stutters. Finding the sweet spot between mathematical precision and frame budget took careful profiling, but the result runs at a steady 60 FPS even on modest hardware.

TRY IT YOURSELF: The live build is deployed on Netlify. Open it in your browser, test the controls, and observe the render response times.

If you are building high-performance 3D, physics, or creative web systems and want to collaborate, reach out here on Contra.