This program evolved out of the
Computer Graphics Course
at Washington State University in fall 2001.
As the final term project, Prof. Wayne O. Cochran assigned the students to
create "something cool" with OpenGL.
The first idea was to write a simulation program for the solar system, but
there is already a brilliant program out there,
OpenUniverse. Remembering an article
from a computer magazine from 1992 ("Amiga Magazin" issue 5/1992, p. 46),
I came up with the idea to implement Sogo.
The program was really cool, and I got an A for it. But it didn't become
very popular, because it only ran in a Linux environment. So, in fall 2002,
it was recompiled for Windows and enhanced a little bit. The result was version
1.1 of the game.
After testing Sogo on different machines, the need for a constant animation
speed emerged. The spheres moved too fast on fast PCs, and so I created version
1.2 of Sogo to fix this problem among others.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Heinz Witt for sending me the original article to start working
on the project. Thanks to Diane Forson for being patient when I started working
on Sogo at her place over Thanksgiving. Thanks to Joel Alfaro as the first
test player. Thanks to Brian Lee for his idea about how to implement the
computer player.
Thanks to Peter Hartmann for encouraging me to continue working on the program
and many ideas to enhance the game. Thanks to Matthias Witt for helping me
to port Sogo for Windows.
This program is dedicated to my brother Matthias Witt for his birthday.
Version History
Version 1.2, 12/15/2002:
Version 1.1, 11/29/2002:
Version 1.0, 11/24/2001: