Animation Compression Library: Release 0.3.0

This release marks an important milestone. It now supports a fully variable bit rate and it performs admirably so far. The numbers don’t lie. Without using any form of key reduction, we match the compression ratio of Unreal 4 (which uses a mix of linear key reduction with a form of variable quantization) and many more tricks will follow to push this even further. It is worth noting that this new variable bit rate algorithm is entirely different from the one I presented at the GDC 2017 and it should outperform it. In due time, more stats and graphs will be published to outline how the data looks across the whole dataset.

While v0.3.0 remains a pre-release, we are quickly approaching a production ready state. Already for the vast majority of clips the error introduced is invisible to the naked eye and the performance is there to match. Major features missing to reach the production ready state are: scale support (sadly the Carnegie-Mellon data set does not contain any scale as such testing this will be problematic), and proper multi-platform support (iOS, OS X, android, clang, gcc, etc.). Both of these things are easily solved problems which is why they were deferred into future releases.

Version 0.4.0 will aim to introduce clip segmenting and hopefully curve based key reduction. Segmenting should improve our accuracy further and at the same time allow us to reduce the memory footprint even further. Curve key reduction will of course allow us to reduce the memory footprint further as well, perhaps dramatically so. Stay tuned!

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