About the Skyscraper simulator

This is the general info about the game, the description section has been written by Ryan Thoryk himself, the former creator of the simulator

## Description

The Skyscraper Project originally began with the simplistic design of a 138-story
skyscraper called the Triton Center that I completed on May 4, 2002, using the MyHouse
for Windows 6.5 architectural designer application. Later that year I started tinkering
with the TrueVision3D graphics engine through Visual Basic 6 (since I've been extremely
proficient in VB since 1996, but am moving on to other languages), and made a small building
with a simple but working elevator. This became Skyscraper versions 0.1 and 0.2. I then
continued to enhance it, and decided to try to simulate the entire Triton Center (this
earlier design of the building was very unrealistic, as you'll see). I eventually finished the
entire external structure of the building, and still had only 1 elevator. A single shaft bank
was made, which housed 10 elevators (5 on each side), and then I eventually duplicated it to
increase the number of elevators to 40, divided into 4 shaft banks. All the other parts of
the program were made and enhanced, and I started to hit serious limitations that were not
only in my program design, but also in the Visual Basic language itself. So after version 0.96
I started redesigning the core of the program, but it became too unstable and needed a
great deal of work (this was originally going to be version 0.97); so I took the old 0.96,
fixed it up (became the stable branch), and released it as 1.0. I renamed 0.97 to 1.1 alpha,
which is the current development project. I rewrote somewhere around 25% of Skyscraper,
and then after long periods of other stuff going on in my life, I decided to stop the VB
rewrite and start porting the entire program over to C++ (I considered the C# and Java
languages before choosing C++). A while back I started running into issues with the Crystal
Space graphics engine (which the C++ version uses), and decided to postpone it and continue
the VB rewrite. The VB rewrite continued and was going strong, and the code was designed
to be very clean and easily portable to C++ when the time came. Eventually, I got Crystal
Space to work properly, and started rewriting it again in C++, using the VB code as the main
reference. As of now, both VB projects have been abandoned, and development on the C++
version is going strong. If you compare the current C++ (and even the last VB code) to the
original 1.0 version, you'll notice that the 1.0 version's code is very sloppy, while the newer
versions are extremely clean and well formatted.

## Features

Skyscraper aims to be a fully-featured, modular, 3D realtime building simulator, powered by the Scalable Building Simulator (SBS) engine. The main feature SBS provides is a very elaborate and realistic elevator simulator, but also simulates general building features such as walls, floors, stairs, shaftwork and more. Many more things are planned, including gaming support (single and network multiplayer), and a graphical building designer. Skyscraper is written in C++ and uses the OGRE graphics engine, Bullet for collisions and physics, FMOD for sound, the wxWidgets GUI library, and is multiplatform. The current versions aim for a future 2.0 release.