About SimoGL

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SimoGL is a project that I have done for the lecture "OpenGL mit Java (engl. OpenGL with Java)" at the Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität in Oldenburg, Germany. The goal of the lecture was to create a simple 3D engine based on the Java OpenGL binding called JOGL and finally to deliver a project that uses the before mentioned engine to demonstrate ones aquired JOGL skills.

After the lecturer revealed that the student should do a project with JOGL, I pretty early came to the conclusion to create a very basic eco sim game like SimCity, The Settlers or Anno 1602. I had some experience with the topic, because I tried to implement such a game before. But the main difference to my last effort was the change from a 2D environment based on picture tiles to a 3D environment based on a height map terrain. By the way, I have not finished the 2D project yet due to a bad class design which was difficult to maintain. A point I wanted to do better with the 3D JOGL project. Therefore I have put great emphasis on object oriented Java concepts like abstract classes and inheritance, to get the code as generic and easy to extend as possible. Furthermore I have not transfered any of the routines or other internals of my 2D project to the new project in order to be able to rewrite the 3D game from the scratch not including the bad coding style from the last version.

Now that I have got to the point when the JOGL version is ready for evaluation by the lecturer, I must confess that I am quite satisfied with the result and am a little bit proud of it though. I produced some pretty generic and well structured code and delivered a programme which can indeed be called a little computer game, certainly a very basic one, but a computer game. And my first one in 3D I might add :-)

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