Game Development

SOMETIME AFTER 1984 BICAMERAL SCRIPT HAS BEEN AROUND FOR CENTURIES THOUGH THE RULES FOR ITS USE HAVE ONLY SOLIDIFIED IN THE LAST FEW HUNDRED YEARS. WHILE PRINTED MATERIAL WAS ABLE TO USE BOTH UPPER AND LOWER CASE, THE NEED FOR EFFICIENCY IN TELEGRAPH COMMUNICATIONS MEANT THERE WAS AN ERA WHEN AL...

Stephane Hockenhull

OMG STAHP SHOUTING!

DMGregory

12:03 PM

@StephaneHockenhull Hey, one step closer to that Legendary badge, right? ;)

Stephane Hockenhull

reported

@DMGregory The [ Earn 200 daily reputation 50 times - 2 awarded ] ?

@Tyyppi_77 I love that the answer is all caps :D

DMGregory

Yeah, that's a pretty amazing Q&A right there. :)

doppelgreener

@Tyyppi_77 that's fantastic

Stephane Hockenhull

One place I worked a coworker would post all her texts and emails in all caps. Everyone else was replying "LOUD NOISE!" she had no clue about the all-caps netiquette :P

DMGregory

@StephaneHockenhull That's Epic. Legendary is 150 times. XD

Stephane Hockenhull

12:09 PM

Not even JP got the Legendary badge :D

I doubt I'll reach it with just 1 viral post :P

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@Tyyppi_77 tl;dr (too loud; didn't read)

2

DMGregory

Yeah. I just think of that every time I feel grumpy about hitting the rep cap. "Hey, at least I'm making badge progress..."

Currently just under halfway to Epic...

Alexandre Vaillancourt

You have to be lucky and/or very good and/or very productive and/or have been here for a while.

DMGregory

Speaking of, I woke up today to find I got the first Unity gold badge. :D

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Nice :)

Stephane Hockenhull

12:35 PM

I only got a bronze OpenGL tag badge :\

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I wonder if we'll see more nominations..

user92578

I doubt it

Stephane Hockenhull

Add "raise the rep cap" to your campaign promises :D jk

DMGregory

Noooo, then I'll never hit Epic! ;)

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Sure! And then I'll find all sorts of ways to tell you that it can't be done :P

"after a survey I did, users don't want the rep cap to be raised"

DMGregory

12:39 PM

Don't got all Justin Trudeau and election reform on this. ;)

Alexandre Vaillancourt

*cough cough*

user92578

build a wall between us and Unity answers, and make them pay for it?

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Haha, remove all links to that site :P

doppelgreener

@AlexandreVaillancourt "Sir it says here the survey was exclusively conducted upon your cats and you were personally interpreting their answers. Isn't that--" "How dare you insinuate my cats are incapable of filling out a survey. Maybe they're not as smart as some fancy journalist but they know what they're doing. Next question."

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@doppelgreener Yes. That. Cats are awesome.

user92578

12:43 PM

BTW what happened to the order of the candidate question answers?

user92578

AFAIK Balint was the first one to post them?

user92578

Or is it the order of nomination?

DMGregory

Yes, Báint & Chris both had their answers posted before mine.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I rearranged them in the order of nomination, that's how I interpreted the "order of submission"

Maybe I was wrong.

DMGregory

They both nominated before me too.

user92578

12:47 PM

maybe we should ask in the election chat?

Stephane Hockenhull

1:27 PM

@AlexandreVaillancourt Have you met with the ethics committee?

So I accidentally ended up in the election chat again because I don't read the name of the chat rooms and just click the upper-left one.

TIL they're sorted according to most recent activity.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@StephaneHockenhull No; do you think this invalidates my nomination?

Stephane Hockenhull

aw you were supposed to just avoid the question Trudeau style :D

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Haha :P

I'm not yet that good at politics, apparently :P

Stephane Hockenhull

2:00 PM

Can we make server days shorter?

Alexandre Vaillancourt

2:15 PM

You could try and make the planet turn faster :)

Kevin van der Velden

I propose launching heavy stuff into orbit, maybe the parts for a few colonies?

Almo

@StephaneHockenhull Precisely why I hate making tutorials for games. People don't read text. :)

Stephane Hockenhull

2:36 PM

Think I'm gonna build a plugin so that people can spread out their upvotes over multiple days :P

Almo

2:57 PM

hahah

user4704

3:23 PM

@AlexandreVaillancourt It's just dumb. 16-bit characters are wasteful.

nwp

ASCII should be enough for everyone!

user4704

For the time being I'm just going to widen every displayed line on Windows I guess.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

3:42 PM

More process and code needed that way, though, I would guess.

user4704

It slows things down, certainly, it's an extra linear operation per line to draw.

user4704

But I don't really care about the Windows port that much yet, I just want to get it off the ground so I have less framework to work through later, and to make it easier to solicit somebody else to help maintain the port without having to worry about them going off and doing crazy stuff.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I'm not sure it's going to be noticeable :P

doppelgreener

@Bálint That one is! There's moderators I've known who were affected by that, too -- there was a lot of stuff they said not long before becoming moderator that they wouldn't have said as a moderator, but people nowadays just see the diamond and see stuff they object to a moderator saying. They don't know when that person started being a moderator.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@doppelgreener The it's probably wise for the new mod to review all the comments they've written in the past ;)

user4704

3:54 PM

Sounds like a lot of work :P

doppelgreener

@AlexandreVaillancourt Or consider "hmmm, let's check if I was a complete dingus in the first year or two here."

(for those of us who joined a stack site in our teens: probably yes)

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Errr maybe my teens ended in my thirties :P

@JoshPetrie I know :'(

doppelgreener

That has been known to happen.

Stephane Hockenhull

UTF-8 FTW

user4704

@StephaneHockenhull Exactly.

nwp

3:59 PM

utf8 on windows is difficult to pull off in practice

Stephane Hockenhull

wide char isn't even enough to avoid handling shift-codes so you're still stuck with that while wasting ram.

nwp

"It's not the ram you are using that is being wasted. It's the ram that you are not using."

user4704

Yeah. Oh well. I'm just going to kick the whole thing down the road, which I'm sure will bite me later but it's not a problem I'm interested in spending time on before I have a better idea of how the main verbs of the editor work out.

Stephane Hockenhull

I just use utf8 internally and convert to/from wide-char for file names. it has worked so far.

nwp

That code snippet is pretty awesome.

Stephane Hockenhull

4:04 PM

AW 57% of the upvotes have already gone to /dev/null

and it keeps going up

user4704

Answer more questions.

user4704

Diversify your investments :P

user4704

(on more sites I mean)

Stephane Hockenhull

but that only counts for the number in the chat, not on GDSE :P

user4704

Yeah, well.

Stephane Hockenhull

4:06 PM

muh imaginary internet ego points!!!!

consolation prize: 47 more capped days until the Epic badge.

user4704

Good luck. It is slow going.

Stephane Hockenhull

Not if I put badly drawn horsies on all my answers! BWAHAHAHA!

You're writing a text editor?

user4704

Yeah.

Bálint

@StephaneHockenhull Just make your profile pic a badly drawn horse

I've know someone, who asked a question on the meta and got 15 downvotes.

He screenshot it and made it his profile pic

I always got confused about how his questions got 15 downvotes immedialitely

Alexandre Vaillancourt

4:23 PM

@Tyyppi_77 I removed the reinterpret_cat, this resulted in that I could the the dynamic_cat.

Stephane Hockenhull

But what if I'm more of a reinterpret_dog person ?

nwp

@AlexandreVaillancourt I've never seen that abbreviation. It amuses me.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@StephaneHockenhull Then you have to do a dynamic_walk instead.

;)

Stephane Hockenhull

But then I have to deal with the const_scat<>() ... :(

Bálint

Are we really surprised about the lack of chat users?

nwp

4:26 PM

Also "cats are evil".

Stephane Hockenhull

Hey. Coding puns are awesome :D

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Scatman (ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop) Official Video HD -Scatman John

►

@Bálint Do you think we're scaring them away?

Noctrine

There used to be so many more :o

Stephane Hockenhull

I think chat use goes with seasons / school semesters.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I invite people to the chat whenever I get the occasion..

Stephane Hockenhull

4:41 PM

I don't know what it's called but there's a tendency that happens in a lot of places for people to go: [Let's try everything we can to make it super popular for whatever psychological reason until it's so filled and noisy that the people holding it together leave and be replaced with petty power abuse and mod/flag wars about the CoC or whatever rule and politics]

I see this happen over and over.

Car clubs, online forums, chat, hobbies, cons, FOSS projects, book clubs, ...

nwp

I heard it has to do with reputation. If you behave like an ass people around you will notice and treat you like an ass, which is bad. But if you are with a really big community like, say, youtube, you will probably never meet the same person twice, so you are always treated as neutral no matter how you behave.

Stephane Hockenhull

Past a certain popularity point invariably it becomes infected with users who all they do is use the Code of Conduct to beat other peoples with and don't contribute anything. Pushing all the other contributing members/users away.

nwp

Which explains why small communities are so nice and deteriorate as they get bigger. Unless they add fairly draconian rules to counteract that like on SO.

It doesn't explain why people make the jump from "I can behave how ever I want" to "I will behave like an ass". That's still a mystery to me.

Stephane Hockenhull

except when you reach the point where you get the type of bad users who use the draconian rules to beat others with.

There's little defence against those.

The users whose fun is just to get others kicked out.

nwp

well, that happens on SO all the time. Joining SO is a fairly difficult endeavor and takes a few questions and answers downvoted, then some dedication to stay.

Stephane Hockenhull

4:52 PM

yeah, SO has a good system

And I think the nature of the site is what saves it from the type of users I'm referring to.

nwp

I'm not so sure SO's system is that great. The rules to keep order seem to have a lot of casualties when it comes to new useful users joining.

Which is one reason why I tend to prefer chat. It is much less punishing when a poor question is asked. Although it doesn't scale at all.

Free Internet Points

0

Q: Why are my cached (in an array) gameobjects disappearing?

First, some context: I am developing a chunk loading system for unity. I load all the chunks as prefabs from disk to an array as a cache. When I need to load a chunk, I instantiate it from the cache into the world. The problem is that when deleting gameobjects from the world (using the destroy me...

Stephane Hockenhull

6:18 PM

Yay! I got my first gold badge!

Bálint

@StephaneHockenhull Grats!

Almo

@StephaneHockenhull which one

@nwp But SO is in the top 20 for most site traffic in the world. They must be doing something right.

Stephane Hockenhull

6:39 PM

Great Answer - score of 100

Bálint

102 votes?

Man that became popular

I'll definitely tell you if I see this effect somewhere

Noctrine

Someone modded Just Cause to be multiplayer?

Stephane Hockenhull

HAHAHA I'm calling it now, there's gonna be so many indie games using it now :P

[viewed 5,838 times]

Bálint

@Noctrine Yeah

It's fun

jc2mp

(Just Cause 2)

Stephane Hockenhull

if the engine already had multiplayer facilities then it makes the mod A LOT easier to pull off.

Not like the Sims multiplayer question.

Noctrine

6:42 PM

Didn't even know it had multiplayer

Bálint

It's just a mod

jc-mp.com

Noctrine

It'd be possible to make the Sims 3 multiplayer, it'd just be a ridiculous pain in the ass.

Bálint

How would you even do that?

What would you allow?

Would you have a single family or one per player?

Noctrine

Sims are essentially a host to whatever your actions are, they operate on general pushes based on the timing of the clock system behind it

You could have arbitrary sims in the world be controlled.

The active family in the sims 3 isn't as important as people would immediately think - it just has the most current resources dedicated to it. The rest of the families that live in houses are being semi-actively simulated also.

So you could likely build an alternative story progression system that lived in a server and sent pushes to both games

Bálint

reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/5ds0ym/…

This is Sims 4, but it doesn't matter

Noctrine

6:45 PM

I think it'd be considerably harder in 3 than in 4 though.

One player + expansions already pushes the game up to the edge of 32Bit memory and the attempt at making it 64bit seemed to have stalled

Bálint

Man, the latency on this one is terrible

How would you guys describe branching in a single sentence to someone, who never coded in his/her life?

Noctrine

Like, in version control?

Are they nerdy / into comics? It's like making a decision that splits your codebase into multiple parallel universes where different decisions happen and then you have to go through a painful awkward secret wars type event to rectify the problems.

Bálint

In code

Stephane Hockenhull

That is amusingly accurate

Bálint

like if statements

But that's an amazing description

Stephane Hockenhull

6:54 PM

@Bálint it's like a gas station stop on the highway. You can go through or skip it.

Bálint

@StephaneHockenhull I like this

Thanks

I'm teaching Python to a couple of people and I'm always in trouble with my analogies

Alexandre Vaillancourt

7:12 PM

You know when you're writing code that's less trivial than usual and you get kind of lost...

Chris McFarland

8:08 PM

like, some kind of semantic satiation but for code instead of a word

trafalgarLaww

Can someone help me please? How can I get a 3D object out of a .png file in Unity?

Chris McFarland

PNG files are 2D last I checked

trafalgarLaww

filedropper.com/islandgrass2

Could you, please, have a look at that?

I need to have it in a 3D.

Chris McFarland

I'm not downloading a random file, sorry
If it's code, paste into https://www.hastebin.com/ or something

Stephane Hockenhull

I second that

Bálint

8:13 PM

I have a VM for stuff like this

Stephane Hockenhull

Or post the PNG to imgur.com

trafalgarLaww

@ChrisMcFarland, actually I have to do the following: youtube.com/watch?v=Zs5retd6vuE&feature=em-upload_owner. And I am provided with a .png file of the background and I can not understand how I am to make it work just like a 3D model.

Chris McFarland

@Bálint Even VM's aren't safe :P arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/…

trafalgarLaww

@StephaneHockenhull, here it is imgur.com/a/L6N19.

Bálint

You can't get 3d out of this

This is 2d

What you can do is use an isometric projection, like in the first Diablo or Sims

But you need to divide it into tiles to do that

@ChrisMcFarland I'm not using edge though

Chris McFarland

8:16 PM

:D

Bálint

This exploit is amazing

trafalgarLaww

@Bálint, are there any easier ways to use it as a background for my models?

How can I send you a model for you to see? It is very lightweight.

Bálint

You can simply draw it behind them, but they'll obscure it

I don't need to see the model to know what's possible with it

trafalgarLaww

@Bálint, do you mean that models will obscure the background?\

Stephane Hockenhull

That's why I run my VM on a x86 emulator running on a C64 . They still havent breached it! :D

Bálint

8:18 PM

Yes, even the trees

Noctrine

@trafalgarLaww What do you mean use it as a background?

Do you have an example of another game that looks / works how you would like it to work?

Stephane Hockenhull

@trafalgarLaww You could combine it with a depth map to give each pixels a depth value, then 3D models could go "behind" the BG elements by being masked out by the depth test

It wouldn't be really 3D tho, can't change camera angle...

trafalgarLaww

@Bálint, I am to make this work on Android. So, I am going to use a Unity Canvas to fit a lot of screen sizes: I will tweak a Canvas Scaler component. But it works only if my render modes are Screen Space - Overlay or Screen Space - Camera and in both of these modes I can not add models at the top of the UI. How can I go around it?

@Noctrine, here it is:

Bálint

I'm not really a Unity guy

Thank you all guys very much a lot for trying to help me.

Noctrine

8:23 PM

Clash Royale

trafalgarLaww

Actually it is my dream to get a job in Unity. But it seems I luck a lot of knowledge.

Bálint

Practice makes perfect

Noctrine

Have you seen Age of Empires?

Chris McFarland

whether using a canvas or not, you can calculate the required amount of camera zoom/size and adjust as needed
Screen.height or Screen.width and code as needed

trafalgarLaww

@ChrisMcFarland, thanks for a solution.

Noctrine

8:29 PM

Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to replicate the depth masking and partial occlusion without individual objects

The Mattbat999

Now I am agrivated. Down vote in 10 seconds yet 12 hours to get an upvote :/

trafalgarLaww

@Noctrine, no, I did not. But I played AOW2 for a long time.

Noctrine

As far as the application goes it seems like they just want you to put stuff on the map

trafalgarLaww

@Noctrine, you mean to put 3D models only and do some stuff with them?

Almo

@ChrisMcFarland WOA

Chris McFarland

8:37 PM

yea

Almo

I would have thought for sure a VM was "safe"

Chris McFarland

safe is probably using a standalone machine that only has an Internet connection not connected to your LAN

Almo

Probably can get out through the fucking power cables

;)

user92578

Damn companies like to throw pretty nice "visits" for uni students

trafalgarLaww

@Tyyppi_77, do you mean my case? (x

user92578

8:44 PM

20 minutes of powerpoint, then pizza and other good food with a fridge full of drinks, then "take whatever you want with you, we're paying for cab rides to a sauna we rented for you"

Chris McFarland

haha :)

trafalgarLaww

imgur.com/a/pVWCh

How can I put this onto a model?

Chris McFarland

@Tyyppi_77 "hook 'em while they're young!"

user92578

yup

Chris McFarland

@trafalgarLaww the process of applying a texture to a model is called UV Mapping en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping

where, in a 3D modeling application like Maya or Blender, you project parts of the texture onto the model's polygons

user92578

8:52 PM

Also got to promote GH to some drunk people in the sauna :)

Chris McFarland

hahaha

user92578

like 100% guaranteed customers since everyone will surely remember to buy it tomorrow :D

Noctrine

9:06 PM

@trafalgarLaww Yeah doesn't seem like they explicitly ask for what you are trying to do - I may be wrong though.

trafalgarLaww

@Noctrine, ok. Thanks for the attention.

Still I can not get the right model.

Noctrine

Ideally the way that you would handle this would be having the ground as one image (or really a set of images that you've composited. Then the things that are on top of the background are images that you've placed around

trafalgarLaww

imgur.com/a/ILBe7

Noctrine

Then you adjust occlusion by determining if the cell that you are currently on is higher or lower than the potential overlapping image.

trafalgarLaww

The models are dark even though I have applied the material as it is said here.

Noctrine

9:08 PM

Unfortunately can't help there lol - never did much in the way of production art with Unity.

trafalgarLaww

@Noctrine, got it. Thanks for the help.

Noctrine

So this is a job application? Is that common now, asking people to build some demonstration project for them?

trafalgarLaww

@Noctrine, are you asking me?

Noctrine

The first part yeah - the rest was more general

trafalgarLaww

@Noctrine, yeah it is a test unity project for the job.

@Noctrine, as far as I know in any software position in my country you are to make a project in order to get a job.

Noctrine

9:16 PM

That question about Multiplayer Sims 3 has nerd sniped me :( - I kinda wanna try it - but with less effort I could probably just make a multiplayer simulation engine.

Stephane Hockenhull

People have been able to breach the air-gap and get data off machines that were not connected to anything other than power. One way was to send an RF signal by software-modulating DDR RAM bus activity and picking up the radio signal.
Get the spy program into the machine with a USB keyboard or mouse and then they could get data transmitted out.

They've done the same with pure CPU activity.

And another interesting hack is they've been able to use HDDs as rudimentary microphone due to the fact new drives are really sensitive to vibrations: I/O will lag depending on the amount and frequency of vibrations and OSes can measure I/O time down to the microsecond.

So a computer with a mechanical drive and no internet connection, no wifi, no speaker, can still be used as a wireless spying device.

trafalgarLaww

Cool! Where did you get the info from?

Stephane Hockenhull

hackaday.com/2017/10/08/…

"hack" as in [trick the hardware isn't designed for] not as in [Hollywood sensationalized evil hacker]

And: wired.com/2015/07/…

Noctrine

That reminds me of the one some years ago where people were able to figure out a conversation happening in a room by watching a bag of chips

The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video

►

Stephane Hockenhull

Other tricks include encoding the data you want to extract as HDD noise, or modulating the screen's refresh rate.

arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/…

^^ the HDD noise trick

trafalgarLaww

9:35 PM

@StephaneHockenhull, what about SSD? Is it hacker proof?

Noctrine

@trafalgarLaww Theoretically it should be vulnerable to the same kind of hack as DDR RAM.

Stephane Hockenhull

They don't make noise and are not affected by noise, however they have huge power spikes when writing or reading so you can still use that as a radio wave transmitter.

What I have yet to see is someone using the fan's RPM sensor as a microphone. Maybe no motherboard directly gives the rotation pulses. If it did we'd have a >16bit x 3Khz to 8Khz microphone.

Noctrine

With fan frequency controllers that should be pretty easy

Stephane Hockenhull

Maybe they don't give direct access to the pulse and only give a count every seconds.

trafalgarLaww

@StephaneHockenhull, out of topic, but it is interesting to notice the i9 is to be released. (B

Stephane Hockenhull

9:40 PM

If we can time the individual rotation pulses to the micro-second then yes.

I'm saving for a Threadripper or Naple/EPYC.

Noctrine

Arduino Music on Computer Fans

►

Bam

Like I knew I'd seen this before

The Mattbat999

3 more rep then I can vote. Yaay! Cough cough anybody wanna help me cough cough

Stephane Hockenhull

@Noctrine yeah, but I'm talking about doing the opposite: send a constant power and measure the RPM variation to record audio.

Noctrine

Oh right, that's a speaker. Don't know where my head is.

Stephane Hockenhull

@TheMattbat999 I'm pretty sure soliciting votes is against site policy. Goes against the spirit of the system at the very least.

The Mattbat999

9:45 PM

@StephaneHockenhull sorry

I will just hope my edits things will earn my rep

Noctrine

I think it does up to 300

Easiest way to get more rep, answer more questions!

The Mattbat999

@Noctrine well, I am dumb at some development things (cough cough everything cough cough) a majority of my dev time is spent on Google, in full honesty

Stephane Hockenhull

Give yourself time

The Mattbat999

@StephaneHockenhull well, I have learned alot about game dev over the past year, so I have improved some. Not a noob, but nothing great either

In my desperation, I now have 3 pending reviews going :/

Noctrine

You're not creating a very good case for giving you more privileges :p

That said, I should also probably answer more questions. The last question I answered was in 2014.

Stephane Hockenhull

10:00 PM

@Noctrine Are you really going to break your [Answer to life, the universe, and everything?] answer count?

Noctrine

@StephaneHockenhull Is that what shows publicly? I have answers that I've deleted - now I'm tempted. But I want more of those sweet sweet internet points.

The Mattbat999

149! I am friggin happy!

Stephane Hockenhull

42 answers
1 question
~386k people reached

Noctrine

My biggest problem it seems is that the questions that I would like to answer would take too much of the time I have to answer them, and would require a bit of testing or learning on my part.

That said, having more rep would give me more rep to burn on bounties to make people pay attention to existing questions.

The Mattbat999

Yes! 151 rep!

Free Internet Points

10:17 PM

8

Q: Is Unity 2017 random number generator deterministic across platforms given the same initial seed?

Is unity engines random number generator deterministic across platforms given the same initial seed or should I implement my own? I know there have been some modifications to the random number generator recently. Answers are appreciated, I don't have the devices on hand to perform any tests a...

unity c# random cross-platform

Noctrine

Wonder if there is a query for getting unanswered questions from users who are active

data.stackexchange.com/gamedev/query/59227/… - This query practically returns all unanswerable debug my code answers - that the user then fixed with none of the code they presented :(

Stephane Hockenhull

10:34 PM

Good candidates for deletion IMHO

Well, the first I clicked the user linked to the library used to fix the issue so maybe some can stay :P

Noctrine

Yeah - they'd have to be looked at individually. But I only clicked it by chance trying to write another query. If you go through them please flag accordingly.

Stephane Hockenhull

10:47 PM

I'm trying to fix a few last bugs in my text edit GUI component. The text layout function works fine for regular chars but the cursor doesn't follow the LF character if it's the last one.
I think it's the fact that it's a zero-width word that confuses the layout routine.

The text appears on the next line just fine, it's that the LF is technically on the previous line, not at the beginning of the next line.

Proper text layout is so complex.

Noctrine

11:17 PM

I need a better name

Get old unanswered questions with no answers asked by users with recent activity

Stephane Hockenhull

it's very descriptive

Noctrine

Unfortunately time to go - I'll have to take action later.

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