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.

Holiday boredom...

I don't have any plans for the Christmas holidays, and Helsinki is at just the right temperature to make doing anything outside really difficult. Some of the snow has melted and frozen into ice, making it feel a lot like walking on broken glass: physically and emotionally; I stopped counting the number of unintentional acrobatics after about the 5th or 6th time sliding in some way.

I might implement zlib compression for network traffic in my engine, which should only be a few dozen lines... or something a bit more interesting; stencil shadow volumes could still use more optimization, or some SIMD stuff...

There are at least a few dozen minor X server issues discovered by Coverity, but that's getting dangerously close to Nokia work over the holidays. The majority of the issues are error paths anyway, nothing really critical.

In the more being lazy and doing nothing area, Avatar looks like it could be an interesting movie...