Skyscraper 2.0 Alpha 8

[eventhorizon]

The new Skyscraper 2.0 Alpha 8 has been released, and is a port over to OGRE from Crystal Space. Skyscraper is a first-person 3D virtual building simulator, that also features elaborate and realistic simulations of elevators. Buildings are made in a custom interpreted script language. OGRE 1.7 is used, along with Bullet for collisions/physics, Caelum for the sky, FMOD for sound, and wxWidgets for the GUI.

You can download the latest version on the website:
http://www.skyscrapersim.com

Sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/skyscraper/

Project forum (has custom third-party buildings and other stuff):
http://forum.skyscrapersim.com

Screenshots:

The 142-story Triton Center


The Triton Center at sunset


Triton Center elevators


Glass elevators


Glass elevator stopped on the 135th floor of the Glass Tower


Escalators (third-party addon)


Working 3D elevators


More elevators


Elevator editor


In-sim object viewer


Open elevator shaft


The Glass Tower (from the movie The Towering Inferno)


Glass Tower side with setbacks


Glass Tower front setback looking down


Glass Tower base


Glass Tower roof


User-created building (Northeast Triad convention center)


User-created elevator interior




Triton Center external view

More screenshots:
http://www.skyscrapersim.com/screenshots/dev_pics/1.8/

-eventhorizon

[mkultra333]

That's very cool, I love algorithmic architecture creation. The buildings look really good, inside and out.

The SBS engine (scalable building simulator), is that your creation or is it from somewhere else? I did a search for it and couldn't find anything.

Only thing that puts me off is the license, I never touch GPL since I want to make potentially commercial projects that are, by necessity, closed source. If it had been MIT, BSD or the like I'd have grabbed this straight away to start experimenting.

[eventhorizon]

That's very cool, I love algorithmic architecture creation. The buildings look really good, inside and out.

The SBS engine (scalable building simulator), is that your creation or is it from somewhere else? I did a search for it and couldn't find anything.

Only thing that puts me off is the license, I never touch GPL since I want to make potentially commercial projects that are, by necessity, closed source. If it had been MIT, BSD or the like I'd have grabbed this straight away to start experimenting.

One thing - I re-uploaded the packages to fix a random crash that was floating around (memory corruption issue), so if you downloaded it before, download it again to fix that issue. I made the whole thing, including SBS - the program is 2 components, SBS which is the simulation engine itself, and the frontend (which includes the script interpreter, GUI etc). It was designed so that different frontends could utilize the single simulation backend. As for the GPL license, there's technically nothing that would prevent a license change if I wanted to, since I'm the only one who's ever coded for it (no license disputes). There is one file though with LGPL code ported from the previous graphics engine (deals with advanced 3D texture transformation math, the texmap.cpp file), and so with that it would have to be spun off into a different module if that were to happen. This implementation of Skyscraper has been in different forms of development states since mid 2004 (is a rewrite of the original, from 2003).

-eventhorizon

[holocronweaver]

Very cool! Love the attention to detail in the elevator simulation. Did you have a particular application in mind while developing this, or was this done mostly for fun? Will definitely be keeping an eye on this project.

[eventhorizon]

Very cool! Love the attention to detail in the elevator simulation. Did you have a particular application in mind while developing this, or was this done mostly for fun? Will definitely be keeping an eye on this project.

It's mostly for fun, and it evolved out of different early prototypes (this is the 5th design of the same idea). I think a lot of the inspiration came from Sim Tower (1994), and lots of people have wanted a modern version of that. This project is more of a raw simulation though, but does have similar aspects as to what you'd expect in a 3D game like that. A lot of people currently use it (they mostly discuss it on the forum, and post custom buildings), and a lot of the more intricate elevator details came from their suggestions. I also for a long time wanted to create a simulated model of the Glass Tower (the building in the 1974 movie "The Towering Inferno"), and that also contributed to the original idea. Over time I worked with others to make a decent model in this - the current model though is based on actual movie model blueprints and photos provided by one of the illustrators (which I have online), and so this does exactly what I originally wanted

The most interesting part is that it normally doesn't use any form of 3D models or maps (you can load OGRE models in this version though), and all of the geometry is generated internally on startup based on building script commands, and related meshes are enabled/disabled based on the user's location. Objects can also be created and deleted during runtime, but not all deletions are safe due to certain dependencies. Startup time isn't as quick, but is surprisingly fast for the amount of work it does. Here's the script guide that shows the script syntax and features:
http://www.skyscrapersim.com/guide/
(most of those are almost straight translations to the C++ SBS engine function calls)
and the SVN codebase browser:
http://svn.tliquest.net/viewvc/skyscraper/trunk/

-eventhorizon

[holocronweaver]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I will have a look through the source the next time I get a good clear afternoon. I am a huge fan of both procedural generation and realistic simulations, so it should be interesting to say the least.

Referring to mkultra333's comment about the license, I suggest using the Mozilla Public License (MPL) if you decide to switch from the GPL. It is a compromise between the GPL and the Apache licenses. The GPL requires projects using the GPL'd code to themselves become fully open source. The Apache license has almost no requirements on how the source can be used. The MPL offers the middleground that only modifications to the MPL'd source files needs to be publicly available, while any newly created source files can remain closed. That way closed source projects can use the code, with the only requirement being that they release their copy of the MPL'd source files so that the community can benefit from changes made to the core project.