ACL right in your browser

This week, the first beta release of the Animation Compression Library JavaScript module has been released. You can find it on NPM here and you can try it live in your browser right here by drag and dropping glTF files.

The library should be usable but keep in mind until ACL reaches version 2.0 with backwards compatibility you might have to recompress when you upgrade to future versions.

The module uses the powerful emscripten compiler toolchain to take C++ and compile it into WebAssembly. That means that as part of this effort, ACL and Realtime Math have been upgraded to support emscripten as well. Note that WASM SIMD isn’t supported yet (contributions welcome).

Both compression and decompression are supported although if you enable dead code stripping in your JavaScript bundler, you should be able to only pay for what you use.

Special thanks to Arseny Kapoulkine and his excellent meshoptimizer library. Using his blog posts and his code as a guide, I was able to get up and running fairly quickly.

Next steps

Progress continues towards ACL 2.0 but I will take a few weeks to finish up RTM 2.0 first. It is now used extensively by the main ACL development branch. A few new features will be introduced, some cleanup remains, and I want to double check some optimizations before releasing it.