ACL 1.3 is out: smaller, better, faster than ever

After 7 months of work, the Animation Compression Library has finally reached v1.3 along with an updated v0.5 Unreal Engine 4 plugin. Notable changes in this release include:

Added support for VS2019, GCC 9, clang7, and Xcode 11

Optimized compression and decompression significantly

Added support for multiple root bones

Added support for scalar track compression

Compared to UE 4.23.1, the ACL plugin compresses up to 2.9x smaller, is up to 4.7x more accurate, up to 52.9x faster to compress, and up to 6.8x faster to decompress (results may vary depending on the platform and data).

This latest release is a bit more accurate than the previous one and it also reduces the memory footprint by about 4%. Numbers vary a bit but decompression is roughly 1.5x faster on every platform.

Realtime compression

The compression speed improvements are massive. Compared to the previous release, it is over 2.6x faster!

ACL v1.3 ACL v1.2 CMU 2m 22.3s (10285.52 KB/sec) 6m 9.71s (3958.99 KB/sec) Paragon 10m 23.05s (7027.87 KB/sec) 28m 56.48s (2521.62 KB/sec) Matinee fight scene 4.89s (13074.59 KB/sec) 20.27s (3150.43 KB/sec)

It is so fast that when I tried it in Unreal Engine 4 and the popup dialog showed instantaneously after compression, I thought something was wrong. I got curious and decided to take a look at how fast it is for individual clips. The results were quite telling. In the Carnegie-Mellon University motion capture database, 50% of the clips compress in less than 29ms, 85% take less than 114ms, and 99% compress in 313ms or less. In Paragon, 50% of the clips compress in less than 31ms, 85% take less than 128ms, and 99% compress in 1.461 seconds or less. Half of ordinary animations compress fast enough to do so in realtime!

I had originally planned more improvements to the compression speed as part of this release but ultimately opted to stop there for now. I tried to switch from Arrays of Structures to Structures of Arrays and while it was faster, the added complexity was not worth the very minimal gain. There remains lots of room for improvement though and the next release should be even faster.

What’s next

The next release will be a major one: v2.0 is scheduled around Summer 2020. A number of significant changes and additions are planned.

While Realtime Math was integrated this release for the new scalar track compression API, the next release will see it replace all of the math done in ACL. Preliminary results show that it will speed up compression by about 10%. This will reduce significantly the maintenance burden and speed up CI builds. This will constitute a fairly minor API break. RTM is already included within every release of ACL (through a sub-module). Integrations will simply need to add the required include path as well as change the few places that interface with the library.

The error metric functions will also change a bit to allow further optimization opportunities. This will constitute a minor API break as well if integrations have implemented their own error metric (which is unlikely).

So far, ACL is what might be considered a runtime compression format. It was designed to change with every release and as such requires recompression whenever a new version comes out. This isn’t a very big burden as more often than not, game engines already recompress animations on demand, often storing raw animations in source control. Starting with the next release, backwards compatibility will be introduced. In order to do this, the format will be standardized, modernized, and documented. The decompression code path will remain optimal through templating. This step is necessary to allow ACL to be suitable for long term storage. As part of this effort, a glTF extention will be created as well as tools to pack and unpack glTF files.

Last but not least, a new javascript/web assembly module will be created in order to support ACL on the modern web. Through the glTF extension and a ThreeJS integration, it will become a first class citizen in your browser.

ACL is already in use on millions of consoles and mobile devices today and this next major release will make its adoption easier than ever.

If you use ACL and would like to help prioritize the work I do, feel free to reach out and provide feedback or requests!

Thanks to GitHub Sponsors, you can sponsor me! All funds donated will go towards purchasing new devices to optimize for as well as other related costs (like coffee). The best way to ensure that ACL continues to move forward is to sponsor me for specific feature work, custom integrations, through GitHub, or some other arrangement.

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