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Write-Once, Transpile-Everywhere: Re-using Motion Controllers of Virtual Humans Across Multiple Game Engines

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics (AVR 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 10850))

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. 1.

    https://unity3d.com/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  2. 2.

    https://www.unrealengine.com/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  3. 3.

    https://haxe.org/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  4. 4.

    https://www.blender.org/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  5. 5.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler – 30 Apr 2018.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/kripken/emscripten – 30 Apr 2018.

  7. 7.

    http://www.gwtproject.org/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  8. 8.

    https://www.xamarin.com/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  9. 9.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adapter_pattern – 30 Apr 2018.

  10. 10.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facade_pattern – 30 Apr 2018.

  11. 11.

    http://www.dfki.de/~fanu01/SalentoAVR2018/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  12. 12.

    http://www.manuelbastioni.com/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  13. 13.

    http://mary.dfki.de/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  14. 14.

    https://lib.haxe.org/p/glm/ – 30 Apr 2018.

  15. 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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DFKI-MMCI, SLSI group, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Fabrizio Nunnari & Alexis Heloir

  2. LAMIH UMR CNRS/UVHC 8201, Valenciennes, France

    Alexis Heloir

Authors
  1. Fabrizio Nunnari
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  2. Alexis Heloir
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabrizio Nunnari .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Lucio Tommaso De Paolis

  2. University of Paris-Sud, Orsay, France

    Patrick Bourdot

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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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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95270-3_37

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95269-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95270-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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