Will it run?

[Clogboy82]

Bit of a tongue in cheek topic. I want to try and find an answer to the all-important question, one that would validate Revit as a piece of essential technology in this world, where there's an overload of innovations every year. The question that was burning in our minds for all these years.

Will it run Doom?

Hypothetically, I think there are 2 ways to do this, one way would be to just launch Doom inside a window that's generated by the Revit api, or even better yet: project the game on a live decal. But I think that would be missing the point.

The second way would be the fun way: find a method to read the levels and textures, and convert this to Revit native elements. Hypothetically, it would still have to run in a window for all the GUI elements to render and catch user input, and it would have to give commands to animate stuff like doors and sprites (RPC elements?). Other than that, my knowledge is too limited to give any educated suggestions or even a working proof of concept.

Let's just have fun, wrap our minds around the concept and maybe even share code and resources that might finally redeem Revit as a valid piece of technology for the 21st century.

[jeremy_tammik]

Everything is possible. I implemented a webcam viewer that projects a live video image on a selected element face:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2012/02/revit-webcam-2012.html

I don't quite agree that this specific use case is a sensible validation criterion for a BIM modelling tool...

[Clogboy82]

First of all, major kudos fort hat live webcam texture 😊 I knew it is possible in (some) game engines, but didn’t really consider using that in Revit. You taught me a lot of what I know about Revit API programming and this reminds me it’s time to visit your blog more often again.
Secondly, I hope the obvious joke in my statement wasn’t lost in translation… 😉 Revit is, of course, one of the leading BIM tools (if not the most prominent ones), but sooner or later, everything will have to pass this time honoured test.

[jeremy_tammik]

Cool! Thank you for your appreciation. Since the Revit API does not provide much flexibility handling user input, it would be challenging and might require some use of non-Revit-API calls. Additional non-BIM graphics can be displayed in the BIM a couple of ways. Updating graphics fast enough to handle gaming might be another challenge. Good luck with it, and looking forward to hearing how you get on!