By Steve Marinucci
Published May 2, 1996, San Jose (CA) Mercury News
SO, HOW does your garden grow?
You can find the answer with Sierra On-Line's LandDesigner 3D, a recently released computer CD-ROM program designed for IBM and compatible computers.
The program allows you to input the dimensions of your property and a rough view of your home, then experiment with plants and foliage to see how your ideas will look as they grow over time through the use of a 3-D mode.
Our computer, a 75 MHZ Pentium with Windows 95 and 16 megs RAM, easily surpassed the minimum requirements: 486SX/33MHZ, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, 8 megabytes RAM and 12 megabtyes of hard drive space, plus a 12-megabyte swap file in memory. However, when installing the program (and in a supplemental text file added to the program), it would allow only a ''minimum'' 20- or a ''typical'' 30-megabyte of hard disk space. That's more room than some people will want to spare. We opted for the minimum, but ended up forced to switch to the bigger installation after the program kept crashing in 3-D mode.
Still, it's an interesting program. After drawing in the house, we added some greenery and flowers that we'd like to see. The musically enhanced 3-D pictures, which we could view through all four seasons, made our designs look colorful and realistic. The program includes more than 30 landscape and garden plans, and more than 2,000 plants. We had the option of even designing a sprinkler system.
All this, of course, comes at a price . . . money, that is, and LandDesigner 3D will even estimate that, too, plus print out your finished design.
If you don't mind giving over a chunk of your hard disk to it, LandDesigner 3D is a useful tool in planning your landscape without getting your hands dirty.
The list price for LandDesigner 3D is $59.95.
