Hello world!

As I am working towards the first playable alpha release of Space Conflicts: Empires using Godot 4 I felt like releasing the old 2013 Prototype of the game.

The Prototype you see here was developed entirely from scratch using Java, OpenGL and OpenAL with the power of the LWJGL 3 library. The very same library which powers Minecraft Java Edition.
Which originally lead me to use LWJGL in the first place after experimenting with JOGL (Java Open GL) before.

As the code base became very huge very soon I then started to split engine and game into several different project. This was the birth of the SingularityEngine.
The newly created engine should then serve as the base for the game.

Originally I planed on naming the engine Space Engine but that name was already taken so I was about to call it BlackholeEngine but a friend of mine convinced me not to name it like this as he associated the very rear end of the human body with the name. So SingularityEngine it was.

Later on the game engine was split into more project:

CoreText: Which was about to become the engines own script interpreted heavily inspired by Cube Script.

ZGUI: OpenGL powered GUI library to render the interface

OpenGL Renderer, Headless Renderer and a Vulkan Renderer. While only the OpenGL render was actually developed but the architecture was there so “simply” swap the render backend.

The development of the engine started to consumed a lot of time and the game remained even less finished then the prototyp shared here.
After years of a lot of back and forth and putting the project on hold for a long time I slowly started to consider to use already available game engines to focus on the actual game.

I explored various engines such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Ogre 3D and JMonkeyEngine but ultimately decided to use Godot Engine 3.

The reasons as of why are very versatile like: Being fully open source software, no strange licensing like with Unity or Unreal and better documentation as the likes of ORGE and JMonkey. Also a friend recommended me the engine with all of his heart so I gave it a shot.

Furthermore a hard requirement was first class Linux support. It is what I work with. Neither has Unity and also not Unreal Engine good reputation if it comes to native Linux support. Adding their licensing model on top made them very unattractive for me.

I had some experiences with Unity prior to this. As I was the Linux QA Lead and 3D supervisor of a small project made by a few people I knew from around the web. The amount of bugs and issues the engine caused even in such a small project which was basically only a UI and a more or less empty area with a few low poly buildings was astonishing.

After completing the various 2D and 3D shooter tutorials I was about to start new games with Godot to learn the engine.
The idea was to get better used to Godot to ultimately develop my dream game without to many backlash because something might not work as expected. So another few years the game was on hold.

While there was a first version using Godot 3 it was not very actively developed. Primarily because I was hit by a few engine bugs I knew would be resolved as soon as Godot 4 would be released. Therefore I waited and only tested a few things but not very actively developed the game.

Then the day had come. Godot 4 was released! Next I started porting things to Godot 4.
Thankfully this was not that much work, even though I had close to adapt everything I had.
As the game is developed as a client server model I had the whole multilayer stack to be reworked as well as some Engine Tools I wrote for myself. But all in all it was “only” a thing of 3 to 4 days of work.

Then things went on hold again…

Until recently. Now the development of the game actually picked up steam and things are going along very well.

So stay tuned for the first alpha release using Godot 4!