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.