SummaryHSpark (Haskell Spark) is a particle system compiler. It is intended as a tool to encourage reusability of code and formulas between different particle systems and at the same time provide aggressive space/time optimization. It is also designed to be simple and efficient to integrate with a larger system, such as a scene graph or a game engine. The definitions of particles and emitters are written in a special-purpose language, hosted in Haskell (which is a general purpose, purely functional programming language well suited for embedded langagues and compilation tasks). The particle definitions are given in a declarative way, i.e. one says what the behaviour is, not how it should be calculated. From the user-provided behaviours for emitters and particles, HSpark will generate code in C++ and/or GPU-asm. This code is then ready for inclusion in your application. The provided class will fall back to CPU-processing should the hardware not have sufficient capabilities and select the optimum way of transfering data to the GPU. The generated code will be as optimal as possible with respect to memory footprint and calculation overhead. HSpark is chiefly meant to aid in the creation of particle systems while maintaining sufficient performance. It is of course possible to edit the output (C++/GPU-asm) files and thus hand-optimize that extra bit before final release. HSpark's origin is as a project in the Advanced Functional Programming course at Chalmers held by Koen Claessen, who also is the supervisor for this thesis project. The idea behind creating something like HSpark was born when it became clear that the particle systems in Reaper had a huge potential for reusability, but each system differed in some ways and the differences was such that sharing was hard to express in a straight-forward manner in C++. A compile-time (template based) linear algebra package could not do enough, and writing a complete compile-time system or even a separate compiler in C++ did not strike me as a very pleasant job. Overall, the task seemed interesting and fun and also very well suited to Haskell's strengths. HSpark is heavily inspired by several predecessors in animation and compilation, such Pan, Fran and Vertigo. All of these are the works of Conal Elliot, more or less. Features (thesis project)
Wishlist (future work)
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Current status
The thesis work is completed and the result is quite pleasing, at least with regard to the language. The compiler needs some more work to handle all systems correctly. The language design was considerably harder than expected so there was not time to implement all intended (and sexy) features, which means that the compiler and its output is not useful in a real-world situation. Hopefully, there will be time to turn HSpark into a Real Useful Tool (tm) some day. Documentation
(2003-01-14)
Some examples on how to
write systems.
A report on HSpark (.ps) when it was a
AFP-course project
is available. |
