History of Skyscraper
The Skyscraper Project
(SkyscraperSim) was started in December 2002 by Ryan Thoryk,
after designing a 138-story building known as the Triton
Center. The name Triton Center was inspired by the Korg Triton
synthesizer keyboards, one of which is used to make the intro
music. The software MyHouse 3D was being used to simulate the
building and produce the floor plans, and something much better was
required for realism and scalability, so Skyscraper was born.
Skyscraper was an idea conceived during an internship position at
Argonne National Laboratory, and originally was written in the
Visual Basic 6 language, and used the TrueVision3D game/graphics
engine.
Skyscraper 1.0 was released on July 21, 2004 as a first-person 3D
simulation of a single building, the Triton Center. The
interior of the building was very simplistic in this version, the
more standard design that users are familiar with was designed
later, mainly in 2005. Right before the 1.0 release, the 0.97
development version was being worked on, but the changes were too
extreme, so the 0.96 code was cleaned up and released as 1.0.
Skyscraper 0.97 (May 2004) was renamed 1.1 (in July 2004), and
development continued on this version, still in the Visual Basic
language. The main difference between 0.96 and 0.97, was that
0.96 could only simulate a single building, while 0.97 was the
beginning of a simulator that could load multiple, eventually
through a scripting language. The internal simulator engine
that it used needed a name, originally it was called Scalable
Building Simulation Engine (SBSE), later shortened to just Scalable
Building Simulator, or SBS.
In June 2005, the C++ version was born, after selecting C++ as the
language (out of C++, Java and C#), and Crystal Space as the
graphics/game engine. wxWidgets was chosen as the GUI
frontend. Skyscraper 2.0 Alpha 1 was released on January 6,
2009, the first public release of the new simulator. This time
saw Skyscraper become truly multiplatform, becoming available for
Windows, Mac and Linux, with partially-working ports to operating
systems such as IRIX still existing. It also saw the creation
of the original Skyscraper Simulator Forum. In 2010, the
primary part of Crystal Space that Skyscraper was using, the
ThingMesh system, was removed, and so plans were put in place to
eventually port Skyscraper over to a new graphics engine. The
ThingMesh system was redesigned into a more simplified form and
implemented as the PolyMesh system in Skyscraper; this made porting
Skyscraper much easier.
The Ogre graphics engine was chosen, with porting underway starting
in November 2010 during the Alpha 8 development cycle, making Alpha
7 the last major release of the Crystal Space engine (the last build
being from 2010 taken from the Alpha 8 codebase). On March 1,
2013, Skyscraper 2.0 Alpha 8 was released, the first major release
of the simulator's Ogre port. In 2016, the Engine Contexts
feature was developed, introducing the ability to have multiple
buildings running together in a single simulation environment.
This evolved into Virtual Manager.
In 2023, Destination Dispatch elevator support was created. In
mid 2024 the status was switched to Beta, and then eventually in
2025, 2.0 release candidates were released.
Skyscraper 2.0 is the culmination of development from the original
0.97 version from 2004, which classifies as a rewrite, and the C++
version started in 2005, to the new 2.0 in 2025. Eleven public
Alpha releases were put out in total, each one being pseudo-stable.