Doom 3 for Nokia N900

I'm sick with a cold, but since I ran out of movies to watch I thought it best to try to distract myself by seeing whether the N900 could run my Doom 3 branch. It turns out the answer is "yes, but very slowly."

I suspect due to the completely non-optimized code, poor choice of formats (should be using RGB565), and avoid using highp everywhere in the shaders.

Nevertheless, it does run despite the currently poor performance and few rendering bugs...

N900 Quake 3 isn't dead yet...

It's been a while since I've had some free time to hack around with Quake 3 on the N900, and strictly speaking that is still the case, but I've started to look into some issues now. Lightmap support, fixing up the input, and adding support for SixAxis/Dual Shock 3 controllers. :)

Okay, at this point I just have the hardware and basic input working on the device thanks entirely to Tomasz Sterna (and others) work.

I hope tomorrow to get some tangible code added to ioquake3 N900 branch as well as testing out the possible lightmapping fixes and refining touchscreen based input for those who don't have PS3 controllers; I only brought mine today. Btw, does anyone else consider it a bit cheap of Sony not to include a USB to Mini-B cable with the controller, or does the PS3 console come with more than one cable?

Yes, I know it's been a long time, and yes the TS input is currently slightly broken. But well, you know the deal with free-time (or rather the lack thereof) projects...

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.)

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.

Alarm clock vs snow plow...

Okay, technically it would be a backhoe scoping up snow/ice from the road and footpath, but seriously, at 09:45 and right outside my bedroom window!

I've had the alarm on my N900 fail to wake me several times, however this is much more effective; now if only they could do it at some reasonable time, like, oh, 12:00 or 13:00... and in keeping with the day of fail, my box at Nokia seems to have lost it's IP address, so no working remotely today.

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...

New city, new job, new blog...

I decided to start blogging again, now that I've somewhat settled down in Helsinki, and hopefully I'll be able to keep some regularity in the postings this time. Picture is from Snellmaninkatu, near my apartment at about 14:00 yesterday.

It's been an interesting year; moving to Finland, working for Nokia, speaking at this years X Developers Conference and Maemo Summit.

Maemo Summit was arguably the most interesting since I was giving a demo of an early version of Quake 3 running on the N900 (also another video.) The whole thing started from a weekend project after chatting to Phil Carmody, who wrote the touchscreen and accelerometer kernel drivers. Actually it ended up turning into a several weekend project, but I digress; funny what happens when engineers get bored after work...

Currently I'm working on fixing two XreaL bugs with projected lights; I did a quick patch for the first issue but the second one is being more troublesome; Robert will probably get that before I do, and when it's 05:30 in the morning, maybe it's time to call it quits for the day.

Although, tomorrow might see the N900 getting more of a workout than Quake 3...