Animation Compression Library: Release 0.7.0

Almost a year ago, I began working on ACL and it is now one step closer to being production ready with the new v0.7 release!

This new release is significant for several reasons but two stand out above all others:

Exhaustive automated testing

Full multi-platform support

Unlike previous releases, the performance remained unchanged since v0.6 but I went ahead and updated the stats and graphs regardless.

Testing, Testing, One, Two

This new release introduces extensive unit testing for all the core and math functions on top of which ACL is built. There is still lots of room for improvement here, contributions welcome! Continuous integration also executes the unit tests for every platform except iOS and Android where they must be executed manually for now.

More significant is the addition of exhaustive regression testing. A total of 42 clips from the Carnegie-Mellon University motion capture database are each compressed under a mix of 7 configurations. At the moment, these must be run manually for every platform but scripts are present to automate the whole process. The primary reason why it remains manual is that the data is too large for GitHub and I do not have a webserver to host it. The instructions can be found here.

It runs everywhere

ACL now officially supports 12 different compiler toolchains and all the major platforms: Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, and Android. Both compression and decompression are supported and can easily be tested with the provided unit and regression tests.

But this is only the list of platforms I can reliably and easily test. In practice, since all the code is now pure C++11, if it compiles it should run just fine as-is. Although I cannot test them yet, I fully expect all major consoles to work out of the box: Nintendo Switch (ARM), PlayStation 4 (x64), and Xbox One (x64).

Paragon data

The data I obtained from Paragon under NDA last year may or may not differ from what has now been publicly released by Epic. As soon as I get the chance, I will update the published stats with the new public data. This also means that I will be able to include Paragon clips into the regression tests as well to increase our coverage.

Next steps

The next v0.8 release aims to achieve three goals (roadmap):

Document as much as possible

Add the remaining features to support real games

Add the necessary decompression profiling infrastructure

Decompression performance is one of the most important metric for modern games on both mobile and consoles. Measuring it accurately and reliably in an environment that is as close to a real game as possible is challenging which is why it was left last. However, ACL was built from the ground up in order to decompress as fast as possible: all memory reads are contiguous and linear and writes can be too depending on the host game engine integration. I am quite confident it will end up competitive with the state of the art codecs within UE4 and there are many opportunities left to optimize that I have delayed until I can measure their individual impact properly.

This upcoming release is likely to be the last before the first production release which aims to be a drop-in replacement within UE4. If everything goes according to plan and no delays surface, at the current pace, I should be able to reach this milestone around June 2018.

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