AnimationCPU
AnimationCPU is entirely handcrafted
AnimationCPU - 14 Years of Solo Development to Build the Development Environment I Wanted.
Because I’m an experienced developer, I have very high standards for development tools and performance. I created AnimationCPU to build something that didn’t exist and to solve as many developer problems as possible around writing code - with the goal of making programming feel more like making music. Today, you might call this vibe coding.
AnimationCPU has a long story. In 2012, I got an incredible iPad 2 and immediately started using it for iOS development. I realized that I wanted to be the first person in the world to develop games on an iPad from the beach. So I started building my own game engine and programming language, ACPUL. After 14 years, I finally launched AnimationCPU on the App Store.
I built the first prototype very quickly in the summer of 2012. It was a basic virtual machine implemented in C++ using ExprTk. At that point, the virtual CPU consisted mainly of registers. That is where the name AnimationCPU came from. In AnimationCPU, everything is animation. It is essentially a virtual processor designed around animation and real-time computation. The core is built with C, C++, Objective-C and Swift.
ACPUL programming language
In the winter of 2013, I created a new programming language called ACPUL from scratch in about three months. My goal was to get maximum performance without JIT compilation on mobile devices. Other important goals were extremely fast compilation for live coding, minimal code, resilience to corrupted code, making programming lightweight and fun, stability so code would not randomly crash or hang, advanced debugging tools, and a real-time time-travel debugger for live applications.
ACPUL has only three keywords: while, if, which makes it easy to read and write. The simplicity makes the language highly translatable to native languages and also makes built-in i18n possible.
Development took a long time before everything became stable. For years I had to debug live code without a proper debugger because standard GDB doesn't work particularly well with live-code workflows. So I developed livelogging, a system that lets you debug different streams of application data in a browser and directly on the device.
ACPUL has only one fundamental data type: float. That makes the language highly mathematical and surprisingly portable. The same code can be executed on both CPU and GPU.
The language compiles to a VM for development and to C for release builds. Current compilation times are about 10 seconds for the full project on Mac, about 15 seconds on iOS and release startup on iOS takes about 1.5 seconds.
Because the language is so simple, ACPUL can also be translated into other languages like Lisp or JS.
Game Engine / OS
I call AnimationCPU a hybrid game engine or a hybrid os because it can run on top of almost anything. Currently, it uses Cocos2d-iOS as the base engine, but the architecture can also run on raylib, other game engines like Three.js, WebAssembly in a browser or even bare-metal / BIOS-level environments.
It can run as a complete IDE with all development tools enabled or as a partial system. Because ACPU is designed around fault tolerance, it can theoretically run on very different devices, even something with only an LCD display or a controller without a display such as a PIC. Obviously, not every module can run everywhere. Instead, unsupported parts simply disable themselves while the rest of the system remains stable.
The architecture is modular: add or remove modules depending on the hardware and required peripherals.
Graphics: 2D, 2.5D, 3D, GPU and shaders. You can program essentially any graphics API you need for a game using ACPUL.
Physics: Box2D and Bullet Physics 3D modules.
Input: Touch, accelerometer, mouse, keyboard, camera and microphone.
Networking: HTTP/JSON, WebSocket, Bitchat, Nostr and Bluetooth. For data synchronization and collaboration, there is acpu-server. It works somewhat like Dropbox, synchronizing files between devices. The same server also provides livelogging, debugging of everything from the language and core to game logic and shared memory between connected devices. This is enough to build everything from simple turn-based puzzles to multiplayer games.
Sound: A standard sound API for samples and music, plus CPU-based DSP processing and GPU-Sound.
Resources: The project is essentially zero-asset. Everything is compiled and generated from code, including the games and the IDE itself. The IDE is also a programing game. The exceptions are fonts and sounds.
Video: A built-in FFmpeg media module for video playback, recording and Twitch live streaming.
Extra modules: Standard VNC remote desktop, real-time ACPU-Bot VNC with FFmpeg streaming, and ShapeOp 3D asset generation. With the VNC and streaming capabilities, you can even build something like a claw-bot controlled remotely.
Development tools: Debugger, profiler and livelogging modules are all integrated. Everything is designed to be live. For example, you can enable debugger.on(1); for a particular formula and start receiving debugging frames in real time without significant performance overhead.
Storage: Data Storage is a 3-dimensional pool/id/i synchronized storage system designed to structure data efficiently and potentially store a big metaverse. Volatile Variables are roughly analogous to localStorage for running applications.
AI: AnimationCPU is designed to integrate well with AI. There is an OpenAI-compatible protocol module for connecting AI systems. ACPUL also requires fewer tokens than many conventional programming languages because of its extremely compact syntax which makes it interesting for working with smaller models.
14 years of history
This is handmade code. There are currently around 100,000 commits. I also preserved the development history, including videos and screenshots going all the way back to 2012. So the repository is not just the final product, it contains the history of how the entire system evolved over 14 years.
Games and applications
Over the years I've worked on several different types of games and applications, including Match-3, puzzle games, Herolessus-style action games, DOTA-style multiplayer, several simple 3D games and racing game.
I also created BitchatX, based on Bitchat, and a mobile media player inspired by Winamp.
Why I built it
AnimationCPU was created because I wanted programmers to feel good while programming. I wanted to bring back some of the spirit of the early BBS and HTML 1.0 era, but in a completely new form, closer to a programmable Metaverse.
The idea is not simply to create another game engine. It's to create an environment where programming, debugging, graphics, networking, AI, storage and the application itself are all part of one live system. Everything is live.
I'm looking for people to join
I'm looking for developers who want to connect to the project, run their own servers, and build games and applications with AnimationCPU. I'm also looking for funding to expand to more platforms and continue developing the technology.
Feel free to reach me. My DMs are open.
Try AnimationCPU
Next: AnimationCPU Art Show
