Models can take a lot of time to render. They are made of thousands of triangles, and some times that level of detail is not necessary when the model is far away. Mesh Simplification is used to reduce the number of triangles in the model, creating a lower level of detail model. The number of triangles is reduced by grouping multiple triangles into one triangle. For example, a head model composed of thousands of triangles could be combined into a cube. This lower level of detail model is then used when the camera is a far away from the model, and swapped out for the existing higher level of detail model.
My algorithm can be seen here and the corresponding gameplay can be viewed here.
