Software
Review of: |
 If
you're reading this, the odds are reasonably good that you're an adult.
And like most adults, you've probably been building the image of your perfect
home for most of your life. One floor? Two? Ranch style? Colonial? How
many times have you driven past a house and saw something you like about
it? The problem's always been, though, putting the mental images onto paper.
Well, it looks like I found a way.
The major part of Sierra CompleteHome is Sierra Home Architect, or SHA for short, one of several products on the market that lets you design your own home. SHA's function in life is to give you the means to not only design your house, but to see how it would look with furnishings, too, and, overall, it looks like a pretty good package. The target audience here is the adult family members since they'll be making the buying and building decisions, but the kids will get a kick out of being able to design their rooms. When I got the package for evaluation, not only did it come with the full retail-style packaging, but Sierra threw in a reviewer's guide. The guide also said the product would be available September 1998 (I got the package for evaluation at the March 1999 meeting). Although the reviewer's guide outlined the system requirements, when I opened the user's manual (very nice, very complete), the requirements were slightly more robust from that listed in the reviewers guide: Pentium 75 or better, Win95/98, 16 MB RAM, 56 MB hard disk space for partial installation, VGA with 256 colors, 2X CD-ROM or better, Sound card optional but recommended (the package has a tutorial with voice), an Internet connection is optional but recommended. Once you get the program installed and running (don't forget to read the manual), the differences in the two sets of requirements are obvious: 3D graphics and speed. The Pentium with a SVGA monitor provides a much smoother scrolling between rooms and scenes. The only reason I can come up with for the increase in disk drive space is that the user's manual was talking about doing a partial installation of SHA and the other add-ons while the reviewer's guide was just talking about SHA. Installation is straightforward; if you have AUTORUN enabled on your CD-ROM (I don't), the setup program fires up when you insert the CD; otherwise, open the CD in Explorer and double-click on AUTORUN.EXE. One slight problem, though, with the installation, and it was with me and not the program. To let me and my wife design our "dream home," I loaded it on the common machine in the living room. The program would install (kinda), but wouldn't run. I spent a week tinkering and never could get it to run. I think it may have to do with only just recently upgrading the machine from a 40 MHz 386 running Win3 to a 150 MHz Pentium running Win95. When I upgraded the system, I changed the motherboard and cloned the 500 MB hard disk to a 2 GB Maxtor. PowerQuest's DriveCopy is a good program, but I think the problem was with the upgrade from Win3 to Win95 (something to do with MS-DOS compatibility). I eventually gave up and loaded it on my system, a 200 MHz AMD with 96 MB RAM. The installation was flawless except that it requires the program to be installed in a SHA directory under SIERRA. You can put that SIERRA\SHA combination anywhere you want just so long as the two stay together. I did a typical installation and it used up less than 15 MB on the hard disk; on the other hand, the program won't run without the CD in the installation drive (it makes sense, kinda sorta). Rounding out the system, I have a 4 MB video card using the SiS chipset, a 17 inch monitor (new and sweet!), a sound card using the Yamaha chipset, and a 24X CD-ROM. As I mentioned, the hardcopy documentation is pretty good. The graphics are all grey-scale, but there are a lot of them and they're all relevant. Between the hardcopy and online documentation, you're pretty well covered. AShow-me@ buttons in each section gave straightforward, common sense approaches to room and house design. Part of what I liked about the product was that it had samples of real home layouts (that you could order) and then tailor for you own use (remember the first paragraph?). Simply pick a layout, double-click on a room, and start "editing" it. Changing dimensions was relatively simple by just dragging. Zoom back out, double-click on another room and keep going. Like I said earlier: We've all been building this perfect home in our minds for years. Even with SHA, doing so was an eye-opener. First of all, how big are the rooms you're living in now? Really? Are you sure? After that, SHA lets you put furniture and other furnishing in the room. Whoa! That was sobering! You design a bedroom and you think, "That's plenty of square footage." Then you drop in a king-size waterbed, a couple of nightstands, a dresser, a TV and VCR on the dresser (I'm a videophile), and a lamp, and voila, you can't get to the bathroom. The bathroom was the same way: put in a nice garden tub and a separate shower stall and you've got no place for a toilet or sinks. Here's my word of advice: Make it an iterative process (fancy, eh?). Size the room, put in the furniture, rearrange as necessary, and then resize it as needed. You do this on enough rooms and suddenly you need a bigger lot. Not always, though; SHA does allow you to move whole rooms around. Still, now I know why the architects get the big bucks. Here's where some more fun stuff comes in. Not only can you pick out furniture from colonial to wicker, but you can also choose styles for floors, walls, countertops, and even baseboards! You can even decide on the exterior trim and shingles. How about custom cabinetry and vaulted ceilings with exposed beams? And do you know why you can do all this? After you get finished designing you dream home, you can switch to 3D mode and take a walk through and around it. Navigation gave me some problems but I think that's because I'm not a gamer. Give it to someone who plays tank wars and they'll probably be running down your virtual halls in no time flat. As if laying the rooms and house out wasn't sobering enough, you can even cost it out. Well, kinda. The program will help you build a shopping list based on what furniture you put in, the types of floors and wallpaper, interior and exterior walls, ad nauseum. Part of Sierra's web site is dedicated to providing updates to collections of furniture, décor, and materials you can add to your program. All in all, I had a lot of fun with SHA. There were also four add-ons that round out Sierra CompleteHome: Photo HomeDesigner, 3D Deck, Electrical Wiring, and Home Improvement Encyclopedia. Photo HomeDesigner takes a different tact than SHA. Where SHA lets you design your whole house, Photo HomeDesigner handles things one room at a time. Again, you can drop in furniture and such, but as an added function, you can make the backdrop a digitized picture of a real room in your own house. True, you do have to get the picture into a digital format, but you probably know someone with a digital camera and undoubtedly know someone with a scanner. I really liked 3D Deck. What SHA does for the house, 3D Deck does for, well, decks. You want a single level deck? One that's tiered? You got it, even to the point of rounding a corner of the house with the deck. Putting plants and furniture on the deck is the same as with SHA: drag and drop. Put a hot tub opening in the deck (nice!). Build it around an old tree. Put steps, railings, and walls. And just like SHA, view the whole thing in 3D from just about any angle. And yes, you can even compute how much it'll cost to build the thing. The advantage to putting all this stuff on CDs? They even made room to put How-Tos with Tips from the Pros and animation. Very, very nice. The Home Improvement Encyclopedia and Electrical Wiring are both small but nice add-ons. The encyclopedia lets you learn how to keep your house in shape with topics like decks, landscaping, electrical, and physical structure, just to name a few. Electrical Wiring lets you learn how to wire your own home, even from the ground up. It comes with the Estimators for figuring out wire size and power supply; the Survival Guides with their virtual Hardware Store; Troubleshooters (self-explanatory); the Electronic Book full of electrical tips; and the Circuit Simulator which lets you model electrical circuits and plan wiring. There's only one thing I didn't like about the whole Sierra package and it's based solely on a personal bias. A little background first. I've worked with electricity and I've been zapped a couple of times; I've wired small buildings; and I've popped circuit breakers and burned fuses. In all of these incidents, I was working with a certified electrician so I could learn. Why? I like to do things myself and I hate paying someone to do something I can do. The fact of the matter is that in many situations, especially within the city limits, you are required to use a certified electrical contractor to wire a house. Face it, you don't want your new house to burn down the first time you turn on the porch light. And that's where my sole complaint comes in: Nowhere in the book could I find any reference to contacting an electrical professional. Designing your house and building it yourself or giving it to someone to build is not likely to kill you; you'll probably see a fatal flaw far enough in advance to avoid it. With electricity, though, all it takes is one small mistake. Okay, that's the end of my one kvetch. There are several ways to get hold of Sierra On-Line, Inc., and here they are:
7100 W Center Rd, Ste 301 Omaha, NE 68106 (Sales) Sierra On-Line, Inc.
America Online (keyword Sierra)
Did I like it? Definitely yes. Would I recommend it? Again, yes. Most of all (and to add some credibility), would I buy it? Yes. The reason for all those yesses is that the program is useful, intuitive and comprehensive. In the words of the crew of C|Net Central, I'd give it a "Buy It." I don't think you'll be disappointed. |