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volume 1, issue 9

Today in loonygames:

New!! The Archives have been cleaned up, fead links fixed, and printable versions restored! Also, don't miss the new comments on the front page!

Livin' With The Sims: theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's The Sims, asking the inevitable quesiton, "is The Sims the first step toward a virtual life where everyone is Swedish?"

Pixel Obscura: Josh Vasquez on Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

Real Life: Check out our newest comic strip, Real Life! Updated daily!

User Friendly: Updated daily!

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id Software: Developers of Quake 2.

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Random Feature :

Blue & Levelord Get Drunk: Truly the definitive interview with Levelord, Stephen "Blue" Heaslip and the Ritual level designer get drunk and talk about the gaming industry.

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Thinking Outside the Box:
Exercise

By Paul "Villam" Steed


We just knocked off 34 faces in about 3 minutes. WHOOHOO! We're cruising right along but that narrow segment near the top of the body bugs me so lets simplify it by some more vertex merging. And the back looks overly complex and since it won't be seen too much by the player in the game, chop it up.

In the front area of the body it's supposed to look like some sort of hard metal holding edge but I bet we can merge those side vertices, leaving the top alone and still get the impression of being hard metal.

So, weighing-in at this corner we have a newly optimized body consisting of 68 faces. We are just too good. Overall if we have three tentacles, two arms, a dome and a body we have used 595 faces. This leaves us plenty to do the guns and connecting hoses.

Speaking of which… Wait a second. I just saw 2 faces that can be gotten rid of…See these two?

…they're hidden by the front plate of the body so they can go.

Alright. We're nearly finished. Before we build the guns and tubes in the back let's position the pieces to approximate the sketch better. We need to scale the arms up a little and make the ends of the arms look knobbier.

Close but the lower arms need to be heavier-looking. And a little bigger…

Good enough. Let's build the guns.

 

(Continued on the next page)

 

Credits: Thinking Outside the Box logo illustrated and is © 1998 Dan Zalkus. Thinking Outside the Box is © 1998 Paul Steed. All other content is © 1998 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't even try it. We've got really big guns, and we're ripped, baby.