Total 3D Home Deluxe 4.0

Rating:
Summary: Useless
Review: For the first 30 minutes with the software I was impressed. But then reality set in. There are three problems:

First and foremost, the software is so buggy as to be unusable. While it did not crash, it would randomly move and change the walls placed in the floorplan. This was not snapping to grid - it would arbitrarily extend walls beyond the structure, or combining sections of walls located in different parts of the structure. Once this occurred, there was no way to edit the wall. When the defective wall was deleted by deleting the room(s), other walls at unrelated locations in the space plan would be corrupted.

Placing furniture revealed more bugs. Two identical chairs placed side by side, and one chair levitated about 2 feet off the floor. Entertaining, but not useful. Similarly, an area rug placed under a sofa preferred to relocate itself such that it neatly bisected the sofa on a horizontal plane.

At about the same point it started corrupting the floorplan, it began to slow down excessively. Changing tabs, instead of taking the second or so it originally did, began taking 10-20 seconds. Lest you think my PC might be a bit underpowered, it isn't: I've a 2GHz Athlon with 512MB of memory. MS Flight Simulator, which requires far greater rendering power, operates effectively with real-time screen rates. The OS is Win2K, and all the latest patches and driver updates are installed.

I did download the latest patch from the vendor (dated 2002), but this had no effect on the problems.

Assuming the bugs aren't bad enough, the documentation is worse than useless - it is wrong. In some cases, you can find the missing items on different tabs, but in others, they simply don't exist. For example, I wanted to add a roof to the porch I placed on the house. The help describes how to do this, but I never found the selections described. They certainly weren't located where the documentation indicates.

Finally, the application design is very poorly thought-out. For example, you are limited in roofs you can apply, and when I extended the overhang on the hip roof I had selected, it dropped the roof by this amount leaving walls poking through.

Spend your money elsewhere. I wish I did.

Rating:
Summary: Useless
Review: For the first 30 minutes with the software I was impressed. But then reality set in. There are three problems:

First and foremost, the software is so buggy as to be unusable. While it did not crash, it would randomly move and change the walls placed in the floorplan. This was not snapping to grid - it would arbitrarily extend walls beyond the structure, or combining sections of walls located in different parts of the structure. Once this occurred, there was no way to edit the wall. When the defective wall was deleted by deleting the room(s), other walls at unrelated locations in the space plan would be corrupted.

Placing furniture revealed more bugs. Two identical chairs placed side by side, and one chair levitated about 2 feet off the floor. Entertaining, but not useful. Similarly, an area rug placed under a sofa preferred to relocate itself such that it neatly bisected the sofa on a horizontal plane.

At about the same point it started corrupting the floorplan, it began to slow down excessively. Changing tabs, instead of taking the second or so it originally did, began taking 10-20 seconds. Lest you think my PC might be a bit underpowered, it isn't: I've a 2GHz Athlon with 512MB of memory. MS Flight Simulator, which requires far greater rendering power, operates effectively with real-time screen rates. The OS is Win2K, and all the latest patches and driver updates are installed.

I did download the latest patch from the vendor (dated 2002), but this had no effect on the problems.

Assuming the bugs aren't bad enough, the documentation is worse than useless - it is wrong. In some cases, you can find the missing items on different tabs, but in others, they simply don't exist. For example, I wanted to add a roof to the porch I placed on the house. The help describes how to do this, but I never found the selections described. They certainly weren't located where the documentation indicates.

Finally, the application design is very poorly thought-out. For example, you are limited in roofs you can apply, and when I extended the overhang on the hip roof I had selected, it dropped the roof by this amount leaving walls poking through.

Spend your money elsewhere. I wish I did.