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.
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Notes
- 1.
https://unity3d.com/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 2.
https://www.unrealengine.com/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 3.
https://haxe.org/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 4.
https://www.blender.org/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler – 30 Apr 2018.
- 6.
https://github.com/kripken/emscripten – 30 Apr 2018.
- 7.
http://www.gwtproject.org/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 8.
https://www.xamarin.com/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 9.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adapter_pattern – 30 Apr 2018.
- 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facade_pattern – 30 Apr 2018.
- 11.
http://www.dfki.de/~fanu01/SalentoAVR2018/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 12.
http://www.manuelbastioni.com/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 13.
http://mary.dfki.de/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 14.
https://lib.haxe.org/p/glm/ – 30 Apr 2018.
- 15.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welch’s_t-test – 30 Apr 2018.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank our student Timo Gühring for his precious help in the development and translation of the TTS and the eye-gaze modules. We also thank Kiarash Tamaddon for the Unity project setup.
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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. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95270-3_37
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