Portability of Serious Game Software Components

Abstract

In recent studies, a component-based software engineering framework (RCSAA) has been proposed to accommodate the reuse of game software components across diverse game engines, platforms, and programming languages. This study follows up on this by a more detailed investigation of the portability of a RCSAA-compliant game software component across three principal programming languages: C#, JavaScript (TypeScript), and Java, respectively, and their integration in game engines for these languages. One operational RCSAA-compliant component in C# is taken as the starting point for porting to the other languages. For each port, a detailed analysis of language-specific features is carried out to examine and preserve the equivalence of transcompiled code. Also, implementation patterns of required RSCAA constructs are analysed for each programming language and practical workaround solutions are proposed. This study demonstrates that the software patterns and design solutions used in the RCSAA are easily portable across programming languages based on very different programming paradigms. It thereby establishes the practicability of the RSCAA architecture and the associated integration of RCSAA-compliant game components under real-world conditions