After having spent months working with Autodesk's new Architectural Desktop 3.0, it was refreshing when a friend took me on a tour of one of this year's most popular games: The Sims^TM by Maxis.   Though I am not a "game" person I could see myself playing this game for hours at a time, if I had the free time.

The reason I chose to bring this game up as the cover story for ARCHIdigm's 2nd Quarter publication ( 2001) is that we can all learn quite a bit about what an architectural CAD program should be able to deliver; especially when it costs somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times as much.   Some might argue that it is entirely unfair to compare a game with professional software but I think we can see who's pushing the edge and who's building one.

As Architectural software continues to grow in complexity and functionality it seems that so too do the interface tools we use to manage all of these features.

It seems that eventually we will loose most of the precious screen real-estate that we have to layers upon layers of menus and iconographic interfaces.

The hope is that some software developers will devise new solutions such as context sensitive menu systems that automatically change according to the work you are doing.

The Sims' whole game design is  incredibly intuitive and fun.  Access to everything lies at the bottom on a console that offers access to the equivalent of toolbars.  In the Design area, illustrated to the right, you find primary categories like Walls, Doors, Windows, Roofs, Stairs, Plants and even Terrain modifiers.  Once you select one of the primary categories, an expanded list of items pops up to the right.  Hovering over these items provides a description and picking on them provides a larger description and image.   Any item that has been selected automatically pops into your design scene in fully rendered mode and anchors to an appropriate matching object: e.g., Door objects anchor to Wall objects only and automatically cut out an opening.

When you observe this game in Wall Construction Mode showing not only 2x Stud Framing and Gyp. Board but doing it in real-time, it has to make you wonder about what you are currently working with as an architectural CAD tool, don't you think.  Not only that, but cost is reported in real-time too and you can monitor the charges on the main console to see if you can actually afford that fancy addition you have in mind.

Does your CAD program even do framing? 

Mine doesn't and it cost $3600.00 +/-.  It just makes you wonder, doesn't it.  Not that framing is so important to me since I will take care of that in 2D details anyway, but it is just an interesting question.

Website Construction and Documentation is an ongoing process that you can either ignore or take part in.   While you are busy working away, there's a web camera in the game that will take snap shots of progress at user defined moments or at major occasions such as a burglary, wedding or the arrival of a baby.  The shots are automatically collated chronologically and assembled into an HTML format for easy viewing and publication.

Think about how you can expand on this for real-world computer design; tracking, versioning, backups, archives, change-orders and so on.   Okay, so some of this is and will be handled by Document Management systems but just image if your CAD program tracked development by some user specified constraints over time and that you could go to a simple HTML table and run through the history of your project to find that permutation that could really be useful now for some analysis, comparison or re-design.  I find myself making so many manual A2, A2b, A2c, A2_old, A2_temp, A2_3b files that I have to sort them in numerous folders with titles like Backup, Incoming, Outgoing, Design_Phase_1, etc., that I am getting really fed up with it all.   DM is currently too expensive an option for our small office so we struggle along as many of our clients do with similar problems.  I feel confident that DM will eventually be affordable enough for all offices to use but when is not soon enough.

Example Website

Character Creation

I realize that character creation is not really something relevant to architectural CAD, but yet we seem to spend a lot of time putting them into scenes for rendering purposes, along with trees, people, backgrounds and so on.   Just imagine not only being able to design them but also have them animated in your design.

Now, imagine that they have been programmed to test UBC, Title 24 and OSHA requirements.  Suppose you run a simulation and a Simulated character trips over a poorly designed threshold and sues you in simulated mode, of course.  Okay, you think I am out there; well, a few years ago when I was consulting for Bechtel, they were running traffic simulations with animated vehicles ( on SGI machines of course ).

For 3D Studio Viz/Max you can design somewhat like this; especially with the realtrees^TM  and realpeople^TM products from ArchVision, but testing for code compliance is something I have yet to see or even hear about - maybe you heard it here first.

You can choose to create a child or adult, one of three skin tones, male or female, a variety of heads and bodies and personality.  As more of an investigative individual, I was immediately interested in the customization possibilities for characters and soon found more information on the Internet than I imagined would exist for a game.  Many sites, listed on www.thesims.com offer character options in the form of "skins" that you can download and use in your game.   Illustrated above, right and left, I show a "skin" of Elvira.  These "skins" are in the form of a .bmp file and thus, if you have the free time, I guess you could dump your face on that scanner and finish it off in Photoshop for that added bit or realism.  The skins are a little more complex than that but it is possible.

So what is the point of all this.  Am I really comparing a game with CAD software?  I'll let you draw your own conclusions about comparisons and the significance of what one product offers over another.  The real point is that we should always be looking around and paying attention to those developers who are breaking new ground towards new ways of solving our old problems.   The point is that we should all say, "hey look at that thing over there, why can't mine do that".