Write-once, transpile-everywhere: re-using motion controllers of virtual humans across multiple game engines

Presented at the 5th International conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics (http://www.salentoavr.it/), 24-27 June 2018, Otranto (Lecce), Italy.

Springer Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-95270-3_37

Authors: Fabrizio Nunnari1, Alexis Heloir1,2

1SLSI Group, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany
2LAMIH, UMR CNRS 8201 / Université de Valenciennes, France

Abstract

Transpilation allows to write code once and re-use it across multiple runtime environments. In this paper, we propose a software development practice to implement once the motion controllers of virtual humans and re-use the implementation in multiple game engines. In a case study, three common human behaviors -- blinking, text-to-speech, and eye-gaze -- were developed in the Haxe programming language and deployed in the free, open-source Blender Game Engine and the commercial Unity engine. Performance tests show that transpiled code executes within 67% faster to 127% slower with respect to an implementation manually written in the game engine target languages.

Supplemental material

Download all Supplemental material (Video+code+results): NunnariEtAl2018SalentoAVR-SupplementalMaterial.zip (53MB)

How to cite this article

Nunnari F., Heloir A. (2018) Write-Once, Transpile-Everywhere: Re-using Motion Controllers of Virtual Humans Across Multiple Game Engines. In: De Paolis L., Bourdot P. (eds) Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics. AVR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10850. Springer, Cham

Bibtext

@InProceedings{nunnari2018salentoavr,
    author="Nunnari, Fabrizio
    and Heloir, Alexis",
    editor="De Paolis, Lucio Tommaso
    and Bourdot, Patrick",
    title="Write-Once, Transpile-Everywhere: Re-using Motion Controllers of Virtual Humans Across Multiple Game Engines",
    booktitle="Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics",
    year="2018",
    publisher="Springer International Publishing",
    address="Cham",
    pages="435--446",
    isbn="978-3-319-95270-3",
    url="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-95270-3_37",
    month="6",
    days="24--27",
    location="Otranto (Lecce), Italy"
}