Three Home Design Programs

A selection of fine home design software from around the turn of the century. Best of luck.
I kept the review to the most interesting parts and didn't do in-depth demos of most of the features in these apps because of how unpleasant they are to both use and watch. They're all intensely fiddly when you get down to the minutiae, and the video would have been two hours of me fighting to get appliances rotated correctly.
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[@stiltongruyere9691]

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

[@ruphia]

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.

[@Sakanakao]

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.)

[@DigiFootageFX]

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

[@zaungaestin]

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

[@biggusmunkusthegreat]

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

[@buzinaocara]

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...

[@DavidHansen725]

"reticulating splines" just got you a sub. 😁

[@QwertySanchezSA]

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?

[@CheesecakeMilitia]

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.

[@HyperchaotixFox]

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.

[@blakerobin2678]

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!

[@MickeyD2012]

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

[@NiemandKatzchen]

What a journey, lol.

[@Ensue85A]

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

[@caralynx]

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.

[@NillKitty]

The way you pronounce "climate" is cute as fuck

[@KOTYAR1]

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.

[@wesd3370]

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

[@cg8119]

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