Monday, January 18, 2010

ioquake3 on the N900


Apparently my little after work project was cool enough to make the news page over at ioquake3.org. :-) I just thought I'd mention here that you can read some more about it in my earlier (first actually) blog post, and there are more pictures over here.

Thanks again to id Software and ioquake3 for a great code base! And to the people at Nokia and Maemo Summit for support and encouragement.

Btw, if you do own an N900 and have played with the ioquake3 port, please leave your comments and suggestions for improvements in case I feel the urge for another weekend hacking session. (I am aware there have been problems installing the package in the past, but they should now be fixed.)

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Avatar 3D worth it...


I just got back from watching Avatar in the cinema this time, in much higher quality and in anaglyph 3D; actually I started out at the wrong cinema, Finnkino in Kaisaniemi; luckily the one in Kamppi is only a few minutes walk away.

I've mentioned before that usually these anaglyph 3D effects don't work very well for me due to varying degrees of myopia in both of my eyes, but I thought the movie was visually cool enough to give it a try with contact lenses instead of my normal glasses. I think this helped the effect significantly, but I still get the feeling that my brain starts to adjust to the effect over time so it's most impressive at the start of the movie.

This peaked my interest in ioquake3's anaglyph rendering mode, but unfortunately they ask for the glasses back after the movie, so no chance of trying it out (at least until I order a pair of my own.)

Anaglyph 3D on the N900 might be quite interesting, but of course I would either need to make much more efficient use of vertex buffer objects to make up for halving the FPS, or do a port of XreaL...

I think the later option is better for several reasons, but we'll see; Python, SCons and Scratchbox is a whole bundle of pain that I really don't want to be getting into at 02:00 in the morning.