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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Yes: a browser can handle interactive 3D rendering while a CPU-only VPS serves assets and runs modest local AI models. In a project walkthrough, creator Plastik Electrik describes building a character-creation app and browser game engine around that split, on a reported 6-vCPU, 11-GB-RAM VPS with no GPU. The design avoids server-side 3D rendering; its tradeoff is that CPU image generation is slow and must run one job at a time.
What the project does—and where the work happens
The project combines two applications: CHARFORGE, which creates 3D characters and their identities and appearances, and 3D GAME ENGINE, which places those characters into browser-playable environments. Its central architectural choice is to keep interactive 3D work in the browser while using the VPS for static files, JSON data, and local model inference.
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- Browser: character mesh changes, skinning, rendering, and gameplay.
- VPS: serving assets and JSON, plus running the language and image-generation workloads.
This means “no GPU” describes the server, not necessarily the device displaying the game. The player’s browser still needs a capable device and a working WebGL-capable browser for interactive 3D. The walkthrough does not specify a minimum client device or browser requirement.
How characters move from the forge into the game
Character creation in CHARFORGE
The creator says CHARFORGE starts with a MakeHuman base mesh described as CC0, containing 19,158 vertices and 163 bones. Morph weights are calculated in JavaScript, and the browser performs CPU skinning when a character parameter changes. In this arrangement, the server does not calculate or render the 3D mesh.
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A shared skeleton avoids retargeting
Both applications use a 163-bone skeleton convention and Euler rotations in ZXY order. The author gives the bone transform as M = M_parent · T(h) · R · T(−h) and says the game engine imports a shared module rather than maintaining a separate copy. The intended benefit is that a forged character can transfer directly into the game without retargeting its skeleton.
Bake once, then animate
When a character is used in the game, its final morphed rest mesh is baked once. The game then animates that mesh with Three.js SkinnedMesh; clones use SkeletonUtils. Baking separates the one-time character-specific mesh preparation from repeated animation, while leaving the runtime rendering and skinning in the browser.
What runs locally on the VPS
Identity text
For a character’s name, backstory, personality, and quote, the project uses Ollama with llama3.2:3b. The creator’s design treats short identity text as a smaller workload than image generation.
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Garments and portraits
For garment fabric images, the creator reports using Stable Diffusion Turbo in text-to-image mode, at around 512 pixels and three steps. For portraits, the workflow starts with a 3D portrait and uses image-to-image generation at four steps, with the stated aim of preserving facial identity.
The author reports garment generation taking about 35–40 seconds and portraits about 30–60 seconds on this particular CPU-only setup. These are project-specific timings, not general CPU inference estimates or a controlled benchmark. The image worker reportedly uses about 4.4 GB of RAM and processes one image job at a time; the author says Ollama is unloaded to free memory during image generation.
The practical tradeoff: low infrastructure cost, slow image jobs
The creator reports a VPS with 6 vCPUs and 11 GB of RAM, no GPU, and a cost of about $100 per year. No provider is named, so that figure should not be read as a currently available hosting offer or a reproducible price quote. It describes one setup and does not establish what another provider, region, or workload would cost.
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The approach is most useful when interactive rendering can happen on the user’s device and AI image creation can tolerate a queue. A small language model and a low-step image pipeline constrain the workloads to fit the reported environment, but the image-generation latency and one-job-at-a-time limit make it unsuitable for a service that needs many users to generate images concurrently. The walkthrough does not report image quality evaluations, concurrent-user capacity, or a comparison with GPU hardware.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the browser game includes
The 3D GAME ENGINE assigns a forged character a role such as enemy, boss, merchant, or companion, then places it in one of eight procedurally generated environments. The creator describes first- and third-person play in a browser tab, with WASD movement and mouse controls.
As a personal test, the author reports defeating five AI enemies in 25 seconds and a 57% hit rate. That is one creator-reported play session, not an independently observed performance benchmark, stability finding, or user study.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsRank #4
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What this example does—and does not—show
The project demonstrates a plausible division of labor: use the browser for 3D work that benefits from local interactive rendering, and reserve the server for assets and appropriately small local inference tasks. It does not show that CPU-only VPS hosting can replace a GPU for general image generation, guarantee a particular latency, or support arbitrary player counts.
The technical details, cost, timings, and play report above are claims in Plastik Electrik’s creator-authored DEV Community walkthrough, whose displayed date is September 26 but whose year was not stated in the available listing. The article is available at DEV Community.
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