Back when I started in this sport the new hotness for stage design were a bunch of templates for MS Office products like Word and Excel. This was a HUGE step up from the green plastic stage design template many had been using for years or freehand drawing. Some were using Corel Draw as well but that required a Corel license (or at least a bootleg copy of Corel) and “laptops” were under powered and over heavy so portable stage designing wasn’t a thing. Things have come a long way since those days.
(Note: What follows is the author’s opinion as well as his personal experiences and should not be taken as an endorsement by NROI/USPSA in any way)
Since that time various concepts have come and gone. There was a StageCAD product which defied understanding by most that tried to use it, and various web products (mostly using Java), a small following including myself used Microsoft Visio (which also required a license and there were not a lot of prop libraries out there) and then SketchUp arrived and took the stage design world by storm.
Many moved to SketchUp almost immediately. Others, including myself, took a bit longer and needed to be shown around a bit but then I took off and never looked back. The ability to do real 3D designs and images made that a total game changer. And even the free version had everything most of us needed to be successful. I noticed within a year that the majority of my CRO and RM students had made the jump to SketchUp.
Custom building out stage props was fairly straight forward if you could handle the CAD concepts and as time went along, the online prop libraries matured. Many clubs made the effort to reproduce their own bays as templates so club designers could develop for specific bay features. Seeing 3D fly throughs of match stages became fairly common place. Getting the best pictures necessary of stages caused some folks difficulty but that was fairly easily overcome. SketchUp became the de facto standard stage design tool and probably is still in use by more designers than any other product.
But SketchUp wasn’t without its problems. For some, working in three dimensions and with CAD in general were difficult concepts to grasp. There were some things in SketchUp which were not real user friendly (the bay floor that was permeable which made cleaning up the buried and flying stuff a chore being my least favorite). And then, as often happens, Google bought up SketchUp and made it “better” which had most of us sticking with old versions because newer wasn’t necessarily better.
A few years ago, Pedro Braz brought out the 3D printed 3D Stage Builder product making stage design accessible to just about everyone. The biggest issue (for me anyway) was finding a flat spot that I could keep the stage destroying cats out of for an extended period of time. And to be fair, more than one stage was “reset” by my Golden Retriever’s tail. But it is about as simple to use as is possible: Build the stage, take pictures with your phone, create the documentation, and done.
The new kid on the block appearing in 2023 comes in the form of PractiSim Designer. I’ve been hearing about this for awhile and the author is regional to me so I’ve had the pleasure of shooting with him (and Loke is a very good shooter…always nice to have a product built by someone actually in the sport).
There is a very useful introduction and tutorial available on YouTube making jumping in very simple. It is 21 minutes very well spent. Not being an online gamer, the hardest part was installing Steam but thanks to fast internet at the house I was up and rolling rapidly.
Within minutes I was happily building a simple stage. Tools for lining up objects, mirroring over parts of stages, and even inserting measurements was easily done. It even has tools for building out the stage description pages, stage building inventory pull sheets, and the Written Stage Briefing making for easily the fastest startup to finished product I have seen.
Loke is still actively developing the application and seems to issue updates every few weeks. It already supports the majority of the shooting sports in terms of available props and targets as well as stage templates and so on.
Is PractiSim Designer for everyone? Probably not. It does require some fairly decent computer hardware to run. So if you are limping along on a 8-10 year old PC or Mac, this isn’t going to be a good experience. My 14″ Apple M1 Max Macbook Pro from a couple years back runs it just fine, for the most part, but does kick the fans on and run fairly warm. Minimum specs are published on the PractiSim Steam page.
I am told there are other design products out there but I haven’t found them nor had the time to invest in learning them even if I did find them.
When I joined the sport in 2002 we could not even have dreamed of the tools we have available to use today. Honestly, the computing power we carry in our pockets and on our wrists far exceeds what we had back then. These tools would not have even been possible in 2002 without a large cluster or super computer which were a bit beyond the toy budget for most shooters. We will see what the next decade brings.
Oh yeah, once you design your stage in PractiSim Designer, you can go shoot it in PractiSim if you have Virtual Reality capability. Dang…Santa just left. Oh well…maybe next year.