What I have: A trained recurrent neural network in Tensorflow.
What I want: A mobile application that can run this network as fast as possible (inference mode only, no training).
I believe there are multiple ways how I can accomplish my goal, but I would like you feedback/corrections and additions because I have never done this before.
Tensorflow Lite. Pro: Straight forward, available on Android and iOS. Contra: Probably not the fastest method, right?
TensorRT. Pro: Very fast + I can write custom C code to make it faster. Contra: Used for Nvidia devices so no easy way to run on Android and iOS, right?
Custom Code + Libraries like openBLAS. Pro: Probably very fast and possibility to link to it on Android on iOS (if I am not mistaken). Contra: Is there much use for recurrent neural networks? Does it really work well on Android + iOS?
Re-implement Everything. I could also rewrite the whole computation in C/C++ which shouldn't be too hard with recurrent neural networks. Pro: Probably the fastest method because I can optimize everything. Contra: Will take a long time and if the network changes I have to update my code as well (although I am willing to do it this way if it really is the fastest). Also, how fast can I make calls to libraries (C/C++) on Android? Am I limited by the Java interfaces?
Some details about the mobile application. The application will take a sound recording of the user, do some processing (like Speech2Text) and output the text. I do not want to find a solution that is "fast enough", but the fastest option because this will happen over very large sound files. So almost every speed improvement counts. Do you have any advice, how I should approach this problem?
Last question: If I try to hire somebody to help me out, should I look for an Android/iOS-, Embedded- or Tensorflow- type of person?
1. TensorflowLite
Pro: it uses GPU optimizations on Android; fairly easy to incorporate into Swift/Objective-C app, and very easy into Java/Android (just adding one line in gradle.build); You can transform TF model to CoreML
Cons: if you use C++ library - you will have some issues adding TFLite as a library to your Android/Java-JNI (there is no native way to build such library without JNI); No GPU support on iOS (community works on MPS integration tho)
Also here is reference to TFLite speech-to-text demo app, it could be useful.
2. TensorRT
It uses TensorRT uses cuDNN which uses CUDA library. There is CUDA for Android, not sure if it supports the whole functionality.
3. Custom code + Libraries
I would recommend you to use Android NNet library and CoreML; in case you need to go deeper - you can use Eigen library for linear algebra. However, writing your own custom code is not beneficial in the long term, you would need to support/test/improve it - which is a huge deal, more important than performance.
Re-implement Everything
This option is very similar to the previous one, implementing your own RNN(LSTM) should be fine, as soon as you know what you are doing, just use one of the linear algebra libraries (e.g. Eigen).
The overall recommendation would be to:**
try to do it server side: use some lossy compression and serverside
speech2text;
try using Tensorflow Lite; measure performance, find bottlenecks, try to optimize
if some parts of TFLite would be too slow - reimplement them in custom operations; (and make PR to the Tensorflow)
if bottlenecks are on the hardware level - goto 1st suggestion
Maybe you should try this lib, it can run on android and ios devices.
https://github.com/Tencent/TNN
I would like to use OpenGL graphic on Android games and read some basic tutorial articles. I think it is very difficult, lenghty and long-time taking to prepare OpenGL code by hand. What is the practical way to prepare OpenGL code in real. Are there any editors to generate OpenGL objects code or any software it can help in generating of OpenGL code ? How do the companies prepare OpenGL projects ?
Quick response: Do some research with google for "android 3d engines" and pick the one that meets your needs.
From an opensource perspective, use any open graphics library out there (#andengine #libgdx #shadingzen...) as the main framework so that you don't need to write much of the complex OpenGL code. For creating 3D meshes you can use #Blender which supports many export formats and you can even write your own in python. There are some tons of examples on how to use Wavefront (.obj) objects in OpenGL (e.g. https://github.com/TraxNet/ShadingZen/blob/master/library/src/main/java/org/traxnet/shadingzen/core/shapes/OBJMesh.java).
There is not a OpenGL-code-generating-tool as you may think. OpenGL is an API which allows you to manage GPU driver states which is not enough to display objects, you also need to either write your own 3d engine (even if its very simple) or use any of the already made ones out there.
And again, do some research and find the workflow and the engine that meets your needs.
OpenGL is freakingly difficult to learn, for a newbie to Graphics programming. If you are comfortable with Java, then I would recommend you look into LibGDX. The way Libgdx or in fact any other gaming engine works is, they hide the difficulty of OpenGl programming by writing wrappers around OpenGL programs. So if you are comfortable with higher level language such as Java then working in Libgdx is much easier. Then you are good to go about your game.
The reason I have recommended Libgdx is clearly simple,
A) From outside i find they have a very active forum and lot of test code, demos.
B) Also the particle editors from Libgdx is something exceptional from a free Open Source point of view.
C) The ability to verify the output in the desktop is something exceptional, it saves hell lot of time.
It looks like AND engine or cocos2d the other free open source engines are no more as active as earlier. Probably they are having good time in Zynga ville :)
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I've worked for some time with Unity3d and found it's 2D part with OnGUI() or GUITextures too clumsy. Also, even a smallest game done on Unity3d is at least 10MB download which is just too much for a 2D game.
So, I'm currently looking for an engine for 2D. I've tried Cocos2D but it's iOS only and I wouldn't like to rewrite everything into another language for Android (so, e.g. Java port of Cocos2d for Android is not an option). Instead, I want to write the code once and with least hassle deploy it on iOS, Android and possibly Windows Phone 7. I have both Mac and Windows.
Just to be more detailed, here are my requirements to the engine:
must be cross-platform
must be efficient
should be C++, Java, C# or Objective C since I'm comfortable with them and NOT Flash, Javascript, HTML5 since I am not a web developer
must have a large community, tutorials, additional libraries which cover most of the stuff you'd have when developing on iOS or Android directly (in-app billing, facebook etc.)
the final delivered package must be not too large
the engine can be free, but I also wouldn't mind paying a reasonable price
I've found the following engines:
Marmalade (and IwGame engine on top of it) - C++, found overall very positive reviews of Marmalade but not sure about IwGame. EDIT (March 2013): Looks like Marmalade SDK now includes Cocos2Dx and some in-built IDE which makes it much better (and costs $150 per year for indie dev which is ok with me).
Corona SDK - Lua (efficiency doubtful), also needs internet connection to compile code
Cocos2d-x - C++, received lots of reviews from developers, mostly positive and many think it's best for 2D
Particle code - Java+Eclipse, found no reviews or comments
Moai - Lua, coudn't find any reviews/opinions on it
Monkey engine - seems to have too few features
Haxenme - it's Flash, I've never used it and don't want to
use Unity3d but with 2D packages like 2D Toolkit
ports of SDL to Android (also here) and iOS - doesn't look to have much support or current development (?)
GLBasic - Basic language, I don't like it
playN - seems to be early in development (?)
Gamvas - HTML5, doesn't look like a mature engine to me
Ignifuga - Python, also doesn't look mature
ORX - not sure if it's still developed (?)
Construct 2 - reminds GameMaker, might be ok for rapid prototypes but definitely not for industry-level games
XNA and then port the game using ExEn (would need Mono Touch to port to iOS and Mono for Android to port to Android) - C#, and is probably more thought for folks coming from Microsoft products like xBox (I come from Android). Also, those Mono tools cost $800 in total for small developers
Impact - JavaScript, uses HTML5. I'm not much into JavaScript (e.g. preferred C# on Unity3d), also not sure about efficiency since it runs in the browser (?)
GameMaker - own scripting language GML and I actually remember this one as a tool for non-programmers. Has it actually grown into a real engine, I mean for serious development?
AppGameKit - C++, yet seems to be still pretty new. Haven't found any reviews on it
use Cocos2D and Objective C to develop for iOS only and then make an APK for Android out of it using Stella SDK. Has anyone done this? I'm pretty sure there will be limitations, and how about Google's in-app billing, AdMob and Facebook integration on Android?
Moscrif - JavaScript, looks like it's more for former web-developers
Starling - Flash 11, i'm not much into Flash
ND2D - not yet 1.0, does it have many features?
So, I'd be happy if you could comment from your experiences with the engines and suggest which one in the list (or anything else that I've missed) is the best for the described requirements. I also may be wrong with my first impressions about some of the engines.
I'm currently thinking of Marmalade+IwGame as the best option but since I don't have much info about Cocos2d-x and Particle code, I am not really sure about it.
Thank you!
EDIT (June 2013): So far I made 2 cross-platform 2D games and used Unity3D with 2D Toolkit plugin for both. For the game with simple GUI I used a simple self-made GUI system based on Unity's own. For more complex one (e.g. where GUI elements can overlap) I used the NGUI plugin. Recently 2D Toolkit added some more classes for GUI which is very handy since one had to use 2 different systems for texture atlases when combining NGUI with 2D Toolkit. I'll definitely try that one in the next 2D game. The main reason for choosing Unity3D for 2D games was that I already was deep into Unity3D both in terms of experience and accumulated code snippets for re-use. Also, I purchased Unity3D pro (with Android Pro and iOS Pro) for 3D games and it made full sense to just pay additional $60 for the 2D Toolkit to get 2D games also covered. I so far don't regret my decision, it seems to have been optimal for my case. The only thing which gave me headache was adding social features with the Prime31's plugins (Android & iOS social plugins) but I assume that their bugs are not the fault of Prime31 but of Twitter/Facebook instead, so I probably would see the same bugs on any other engine or plugin.
EDIT (Jan 2014): I guess with Unity 4.3 the answer to my question is pretty obvious now: the Unity's new sprites system and maybe also 2DToolkit totally beat anything else, especially for people who have (like me) been on Unity for a while and purchased the Pro version with add-ons.
LibGDX is one of the best engines I've ever used, works on almost all platforms, and performs twice as fast as cocos2d-x in most tests I've done. You can use any JVM language you like. Here's a 13 part tutorial in Java, and here's a bunch using jruby. There's a good skeletal animation tool that works with it here, and it has baked in support for tiled TMX maps as well. The ui framework is awesome, and it has a scene graph and actor style API similar to cocos2d scenes, sprites and actions. The community is awesome, updates are frequent, and the documentation is good. Don't let the java part scare you, it's fast, and you can use jruby or scala or whatever you like. I highly recommend it for 2d or 3d work, it supports both.
I've worked with Marmalade and I found it satisfying. Although it's not free and the developer community is also not large enough, but still you can handle most of the task using it's tutorials. (I'll write my tutorials once I got some times too).
IwGame is a good engine, developed by one of the Marmalade user. It's good for a basic game, but if you are looking for some serious advanced gaming stuff, you can also use Cocos2D-x with Marmalade. I've never used Cocos2D-x, but there's an Extension on Marmalade's Github.
Another good thing about Marmalade is it's EDK (Extension Development Kit), which lets you make an extension for whatever functionality you need which is available in native code, but not in Marmalade. I've used it to develop my own Customized Admob extension and a Facebook extension too.
Edit:
Marmalade now has it's own RAD(Rapid Application Development) tool just for 2D development, named as Marmalade Quick. Although the coding will be in Lua not in C++, but since it's built on top of C++ Marmalade, you can easily include a C++ library, and all other EDK extensions. Also the Cocos-2Dx and Box2D extensions are preincluded in the Quick. They recently launched it's Release version (It was in beta for 3-4 months). I think we you're really looking for only 2D development, you should give it a try.
Update:
Unity3D recently launched support for 2D games, which seems better than any other 2D game engine, due to it's GUI and Editor. Physics, sprite etc support is inbuilt. You can have a look on it.
Update 2
Marmalade is going to discontinue their SDK in favor of their in-house game production soon. So it won't be a wise decision to rely on that.
You mention Haxe/NME but you seem to instinctively dislike it. However, my experience with it has been very positive. Sure, the API is a reimplementation of the Flash API, but you're not limited to targeting Flash, you can also compile to HTML5 or native Windows, Mac, iOS and Android apps. Haxe is a pleasant, modern language similar to Java or C#.
If you're interested, I've written a bit about my experience using Haxe/NME: link
V-Play (v-play.net) is a cross-platform game engine based on Qt/QML with many useful V-Play QML game components for handling multiple display resolutions & aspect ratios, animations, particles, physics, multi-touch, gestures, path finding and more. API reference
The engine core is written in native C++, combined with the custom renderer, the games reach a solid performance of 60fps across all devices.
V-Play also comes with ready-to-use game templates for the most successful game genres like tower defense, platform games or puzzle games.
If you are curious about games made with V-Play, here is a quick selection of them:
Squaby: a tower defense game
Chicken Outbreak: a platformer like Doodle Jump
Blockoban: puzzle game
Crazy Elephant: a game similar to Angry Birds
Snowball Mania: multiplayer action game
Blitzkopf: brain game
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the guys behind V-Play)
Here is just a reply from Richard Pickup on LinkedIn to a similar question of mine:
I've used cocos 2dx marmalade and unity on both iOS and android. For
2d games cocos2dx is the way to go every time. Unity is just too much
overkill for 2d games and as already stated marmalade is just a thin
abstraction layer not really a game engine. You can even run cocos2d
on top of marmalade. My approach would be to use cocos2dx on iOS and
android then in future run cocosd2dx code on top of marmalade as an
easy way to port to bb10 and win phone 7
I find a nice and tidy Wave game engine few days ago. It uses C# and have Windows Phone and Windows Store converters as well which makes it a great replacement of XNA for me
and what about LibGDX from BadLogicGames?
Check out Loom (http://theengine.co) is a new cross platform 2D game engine featuring hot swapping code & assets on devices. This means that you can work in Photoshop on your assets, you can update your code, modify the UI of your app/game and then see the changes on your device(s) while the app is running.
Thinking to the other cross platform game engines I’ve heard of or even played with, the Loom Game Engine is by far the best in my oppinion with lots of great features. Most of the other similar game engines (Corona SDK, MOAI SDK, Gideros Mobile) are Lua based (with an odd syntax, at least for me). The Loom Game Engine uses LoomScripts, a scripting language inspired from ActionScript 3, with a couple of features borrowed from C#. If you ever developed in ActionScript 3, C# or Java, LoomScript will look familiar to you (and I’m more comfortable with this syntax than with Lua’s syntax).
The 1 year license for the Loom Game Engine costs $500, and I think it’s an affordable price for any indie game developer. Couple of weeks ago the offered a 1 year license for free too. After the license expires, you can still use Loom to create and deploy your own games, but you won’t get any further updates. The creators of Loom are very confident and they promised to constantly improve their baby making it worthwile to purchase another license.
Without further ado, here are Loom’s great features:
Cross platform (iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux/Ubuntu)
Rails-inspired workflow lets you spend your time working with your game (one command to create a new project, and another command to run it)
Fast compiler
Live code and assets editing
Possibility to integrate third party libraries
Uses Cocos2DX for rendering
XML, JSON support
LML (markup language) and CSS for styling UI elements
UI library
Dependency injection
Unit test framework
Chipmunk physics
Seeing your changes live makes multidevice development easy
Small download size
Built for teams
You can find more videos about Loom here: http://www.youtube.com/user/LoomEngine?feature=watch
Check out this 4 part in-depth tutorial too: http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2013/02/28/A-closer-look-at-the-Loom-game-engine-Part-one-getting-started.aspx
I've tried AppGameKit, It's both c++ and Basic.
It's very easy to code 2d games in the Basic varient, with physics, collision and heaps more.
It's also in active development, and really cheap (65$).
The main problem is that it's really hard to compile for Android (you need to download heaps of files and follow difficult guides and things like that)
My opinion is that it isn't yet good enough for commercial use, but is good for indie programmers
It's got a medium size community
I currently use Corona for business applications with great success. As far as games go, I'm under the impression that it doesn't provide the performance that some of the other cross-platform development engines do. It is worth noting that Carlos (founder of Ansca Mobile/Corona SDK) has started another company on a competing engine; Lanica Platino Engine for Appcelerator Titanium. While I haven't worked with this personally, it does look promising. Keep in mind, however, that it comes with a $999/yr price tag.
All that said, I have been researching Moai for a little while now (since I am already familiar with Lua syntax) and it does seem promising. The fact that it can compile for multiple platforms, not limited to mobile environments, is appealing.
Multimedia Fusion 2 is also a worth contender, considering the complexity of games produced and the performance realized from them. Vincere Totus Astrum (http://gamesare.com) comes to mind.
Recently I used an AS3 engine: PushButton (now is dead, but it's still functional and you could use something else) to do this job. To make it works with Android and iOS, the project was compiled in AIR for both platforms and everything worked with no performance damage. Since Flash Builder is kinda expensive ($249), you could use FlashDevelop (there is some tutorials to compile in AIR with it).
Flash could be an option since is very easy to learn.
I'm going to work in the next weeks on a visualisation project on android tablets and mobile devices. This is a kind of project where there is webservices calls, databases and little processing but a lot of data visualisation and manipulation. Mainly 2D (advanced charts and advanced graphs). Like http://max-planck-research-networks.net/.
And I was wondering if there was some framework on android that could accelerate my devs. I heard about game engine (like AndEnine and cocos) but i'm looking for something more like processing.org. Any idea?
You might be able to use a graphing library like http://code.google.com/p/achartengine/ or http://code.google.com/p/chartdroid/
I am also currently looking for a framwork that could do this. Up to now the best I could find was JUNG (http://jung.sourceforge.net/). JUNG uses swing in its renderer, so to use it with android a new renderer would need to be built.
As the topic states - is there any technology that would let me write code for a simple commercial 2D game which could be then compiled to work well on Android, iOS and Web browsers or at least two of them (e.g. Android and iOS)? There is so much buzz about cross-platform nowadays that I was wondering if I'm missing something.
My goal (set by my producer) is to make this game for all of these three platforms, and so far I planned to use:
- Web browsers: Adobe Flex,
- Android phones: Java (since my favourite C++ is recommended only for short snippets),
- iPad/iPhone/iPod: Objective-C (are there any alternatives?).
It pretty much means re-writing the same source code three times. Is there any way to speed it up by using a technology that would work on at least both of them?
However, I don't want to use Adobe Flex for all three (though it's possible), because it requires Adobe AIR (works only with Android 2.2 and higher) and not a lot of phones have it (it's totally different with browsers where 98% of people have Flash).
I don't mind adding some platform-specific code for each version, of course.
Also, if you have any suggestions about choosing a fancier technology for any of the platforms (maybe some nice frameworks?), I'd really appreciate that, too.
Take a look at Corona and Moai both are Lua-based frameworks for game development targeting multiple platforms.
I would like to say that Multimedia Fusion was capable of doing this, but it isn't quite ready yet. There are currently a number of runtime exporters for the product which allow you to export your game to multiple target platforms which include flash, java and iOS at the moment. XNA and Android exporters are currently in the works. I should probably mention that I am only affiliated with these guys as a happy consumer of their products. It is probably worth checking it out even if they can't do everything you want yet. If it's not suitable for your needs it is still a very good choice if you wish to rapidly prototype your application.
See:
http://www.clickteam.com
On a side note, personally I would recommend against going down the js+html5 route, particularly if you are targeting mobiles. I should probably stress that it's simply an opinion I have and that there are plenty of people here who will disagree with me. In all javascript games I have played, I have felt the garbage collector. The issue is that without control over garbage collection it is free to run when it feels like, causing infrequent but very obvious pauses in the middle of your game. You can work around this but I don't see why it should be that difficult. I can definitely align with the ideals of being able to write the thing once and run it on all platforms, but I can't see it working just yet.
To offer some advice assuming you find no suitable tools for the job, your aim is to maximise reusability. This means all of your games resources and levels should be well defined as independent resources. For non-critical logic you can make use of embeddable scripting languages such as Lua, which will maximise your code reuse. C (or C++) code will also be reusable on a lot of platforms, and might be a good choice if you are familiar and confident with the language.
I'm personally using Phonegap and Zepto.js. But you may have more luck with jQuery mobile. Phonegap is nice because its website will compile the apps for you.
1) If you write your game in C++ you can use it for iPhone & Android (NDK) as well. Preferably, you write your game engine in C++, than you can use a OS specific layer for UI stuff..
2) Implement your game in HTML & Javascript. iPhone/Android users will have to use a webbrowser to play your game. For iPhone, you can even create a launcher, that looks like an app, but actually is a webview with HTML & Javascript
Unity3D should be able to do this for you, if you purchase some extra sprite addins to handle 2D (like Ex2D or SM2 or Toolkit 2D). Also right now until Apr 8, the iOS and Android license is free.
Game Maker Studio. It has a package that let's you deploy on all of the platforms you outlined.
http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/studio