Three Home Design Programs 

My favorite thing about the Sims series was the home design aspect.

Re wireframe not being faster: OpenGL at that time had a "wireframe" rendering mode that instead of drawing lines did all the calculations for the entire triangle and discarded all pixels not on the edge. It was generally slower than just rendering the full triangles. (You could actually render fast wireframe mode by drawing lines instead of triangles, but that involved writing more code instead of just changing one setting.)

My dad used to get these programs all the time. I've never known why. He never installed them or used them, as far as I can recall, but man he must have bought fifteen different variations of these. Oh wow that really is a dope shirt.

this gives me the weirdest feelings of nostalgia. I remember playing landscape design 3d as a kid. And I was sooo fascinated, lol.

Holy fucking shit this takes me back. I spent so much time as a kid using these programs designing secret agent offices for myself.

I'd love to see more videos reviewing old, crappy graphics software like this. These are great.

wow, the nostalgia of seeing this type of shovelware... I think my mom tried out that landscaping one or some variation of it and was quite disapointed. She was a professional architect though. Her workflow then, I believe, consisted of using AutoDesk's Autocad with an architecture fovused plug-in called Arqui3D for design, and 3D Studio Max for rendering. Those software actually gave her and her workers a full feature set to do real work on, and the finals renders did look much better than anything here, even in 98 or thereabouts...

Hey great video! It's really interesting seeing these old home design software and how they worked. And it's funny, I ONLY know Expert software as a sega pc redistributor, I didn't know they did other things.

So many weird memories of Punch! Super Home Suite have been unlocked. I loved exploring the model homes from a first-person perspective - something The Sims could never match.

What a journey, lol. The near-clip on that second program was kind of painful, but the low quality rendering on the curves while moving was neat.

also I think the ground contours thing, when you made one that was +12 inside the -1000 hole, it only put that part of the hole up to -988 so you would have had to put it to 1012 to get it to the place you wanted, maybe?

"reticulating splines" just got you a sub. 😁

Lethally inaccurate is possibly the best insult I have ever heard. Btw it's wonderful to find another lefty IT person. We're a rare breed. Sol dot exe forever!

I remember playing around with Visual Home back when I was kindergarten age. Didn't remember anything else about it, but that default wooden floor and the camera indicator on the blueprint view was instantly recognizable.

Did you update direct x and check preferences in the menus for 3d settings?

I definitely poured hours into the Sierra Visual Home software as a kid, instant nostalgia

The way you pronounce "climate" is cute as fuck

Yeah, as I suspected, the Win95 version tries to take advantage of 32 bit multi-tasking (notice the ability to work with both the 2d and 3d windows side by side, while the Win 3.1 version is running the 16 bit code. Unfortunately, this is also part of the reason the software was lagging, because their code probably wasn't fully optimized for the 32 bit architecture. Also, the win 95 version did have much more detail in the bitmap textures, which will drain sys resources quickly. Textures are still really much more resource-intensive to run than polygons, but we still tend to budget polygons in a scene because textures are more important for visual appearance (to a certain extent), even in modern 3d software.

Back when I was a kid I was using the Pi 3D GCS I was super into it, and then I got into the 3D CAD programs. I wanted to build a virtual world, remember this is in the 90s, at that point I was running mostly on Dos as well we had Windows 3.1.. I would literally play sick in the morning so my mom would not make me go to school and I would play with the computer and watch TV all day. HGTV had these cool programs about architecture and Gardens which really motivated me, but on their commercials I seen this exact product, expert software landscape design... Okay now I'm going to watch this episode just had to drop an awesome comment

4:13 I've made some pamphlets like these back in school, it's not actually that hard, just not usual for an actual print booklet. what makes these how they are is that they're folded and stapled at intervals instead of a stack, this only works if every section is the same amount of pages.

This video was much more entertaining than I thought a video about old home design software would be

"If you need to design a home on a Pentium 3"... I love this.

I am loving this video, i had the same phase as a kid getting super interested in house design software and had completely forgotten. Does anyone wonder if houses and gardens were ever made to a spec built in one of these programs? groverhaus but i'm not convinced grover at any point sat down and intentionally designed it.

I love the printout of TV test picture in the background. Lesser person wouldn't have bothered at all. Only a person with a sense of style would pin something like that.

I like your screen saver with the little tumbling components, got a link for it? Does anyone else know where I can find it?

Those double floppy single bay setups are so dang slick. I'm jealous lol.

HEY! You used your computer's cup holder wrong! 🤣🤓

Not Sure if this will be seen. But i was going through all my old cd's and happen to look at "sonic 3d blast" and saw that it was distributed by expert software. So my guess is that's where they got licensing from.

Oh man my mom and stepdad used to use the Expert software, LOL.

wait was only one guy hired to do the programming for these expert software titles according to the credits? I can only imagine him getting in way over his head and slowly learning 3d graphics programming over half a decade

Expert Software also published the PC version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, FWIW

Holy damn i forgot that electronic component screensaver existed and now i want it

Wow what a flashback! I remember seeing those on the shelves at staples and wanting them so bad as a kid. Looks like I dodged a bullet haha

i've been looking forward to this video all day. i'm only three minutes in & already it's delightful. i miss you so much. :)

If you think home designers are bad, take a look at garden designer. One of the ones I tried a long time ago had a CAT as a placeable object.

The playing card king (to the left of sonic on the catalogue)on the bike is the joker design from bicycle brand playing cards. So Sonic isn't the only character where it is questionable if they had the rights to use them that way.

What does the "exterior" icon does in the last program?

Oh, p.s. i would totally watch you stream stuff like this

It makes sense that most 3D features are only available on Windows 95 because it was the first version of Windows to come with DirectX.

That tutorial was probably made for the designers in Sierra and it wouldn't surprise me if this started life as an internal tool for designing their games in a move to 3d

if i had known you were into these programs more than just dunking on them, i would have called you while i was taking this cad class because autodesk revit is a unique kind of madness

can I export the models and use them to make shitty unity horror games ?

I love this entire video so damn much

InstallShield wizards are my ASMR.

You don't need a "super-set" of all features in order to important/map the basic vector graphics from another file format.

Interesting to see how they tried to cram so much stuff into a consumer application back in the day. The developers seemed to have lofty goals, maybe they where envisioning to create Autodesk Revit. That’s today’s pro software that the building and construction industry uses. It’s got a janky UI but it at least renders things nicely and it sort of works OK. It’s learning curve on the other hand….. is quite a bit steeper that these home designer programs. I use it only a daily bases. It’s been in development for 20 years and Architects aren’t satisfied with it any more.

Hell yeah @ the Myst book reference. "The Book of Tiana" was amazing lore.

Lol ~9:00, "I'm just amazed how much better it isn't"

_yet another case_ where you have wrung surrealistic joy out of software packages that my mind refused to even register the existence of, as i scanned through the virtual or physical shelves in search of another shitty fps that i'd forget within weeks.

My sister and I had something like this, but it wasn't one of those specifically. I'll have to see if I can dig it up

I'm surprised nobody else saw the AOL guy in these programs. At least so far.

I also celebrate the 4th by throwing rocks and spraying silly string!

These Programs are Actually Impressive for their time.

The Hellhouse just invites closet burglars to break into all the closets and burgle them.

Ah yes, McMansion CAD

We had the Data Becker version of this.

Man, and I had to do all my home design as a kid in Sims, like a SUCKER

Based comrade. I also played home designer software as a kid and I've never considered someone else did till now.

Home architect was actually pretty good if I remember correctly. I had one of these programs early 2000s that let you design homes and landscaping and it was much better than these

7:25 lmao velocity x, great game

Ooh. Ooh, ooh, ooh! Is one of them The Sims? Edit: Awwww.

I love the shirt 👍

So are you Anthony’s brother from LTT

Unrealistic in terms of financial engineering feasibility IF ONLY because an entire, let alone partial, ass-deck, on an otherwise extravagantly modest home, would be an upside-down investment the day the building contract was signed by the owner. But hey, could just call it aggressive gentrification... Yeah right. Entire ass deck... extravagantly modest home... pffft. Psssht.

Please don't get political and just make great videos. Please.....