Publication
Write-Once, Transpile-Everywhere: Re-using Motion Controllers of Virtual Humans Across Multiple Game Engines
Fabrizio Nunnari; Alexis Heloir
In: Lucio Tommaso De Paolis; Patrick Bourdot (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics. International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics (SalentoAVR-2018), June 24-27, Otranto, Italy, Pages 435-446, ISBN 978-3-319-95270-3, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 6/2018.
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.