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JGodevac is a Java3D based prototypical game engine that was written by me as a university project. Prototypical means, that I spent more attention on the aspects of the topics of the lectures, which this work was created for. These lectures are Graphical Programming and Parallel Programming. Other fields, e.g. usability and graphical user interfaces, got much less attention during the three months of development.

The main idea behind this game equals the well known "Scorched Earth". There are many game variantions today that base on this principle, in 3D and in 2D. But with JGodevac I not only copied this principle, I enhanced it with a feature known of 3rd person games. So it's possible to move freely with your unit in the generated ground.
And another thing has changed. While the original game was round-based, JGodevac is real-time. This means, that alls units are moving at the same time and all players may shoot at any time.

But the most important thing didn't change: The players have to hit each other with bullets. And that's not easy, because you have to adjust the canon in the right angle. And you have to do this without a crosshair. Last but not least, the opponent is moving and trying to avoid being hit.

To generate the terrain, I've implemented an own algorithm in Java3D. For this algorithm, two images are needed. The first one is the so called heightmap. This graphic is usually a greyscaled image which tells the program the heights of the terrain. So every pixel on the heightmap adjusts the height of a certain point on the terrain. In this case I told the white pixel to be the highest point and the black one to be the lowest one possible. Between this values is beeing interpolated, so we have 255 height-values that are possible. So the result is a threedimensional net. At the end, the second image is needed as a texture and is laid on top of the net. This image is usually colored and has to fit to the heightmap.

The emphasis of this project clearly was the creation of the terrain, and not the movement and positioning of the units. So you will see the untis are not positioned very well on certain kinds of terrains. There are till a lot of bugs in the caluclation of the angles of the units, but the short time didn't allow me to do better. Also, hits are not yet calculated, so it isn't possible to do a real match at the moment.

But it is possible to play the game on the network with to parties. The program can be server or client, so there is no extra server program required.

I will upload a binary in the future if you are interested and I will also perpare the code and then release it under the GPL.