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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
- Start date
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Just tested, I didn't have any problems opening any of them. GTX 760, drivers 335.23.
I can confirm that it doesn't run on my GT 650m because I'm on a Mac
Best of luck with the troubleshooting. I can understand how frustrating it must be to do.
I'm very sorry to report that they all crashed on my end as well. Running a GTX 560, with drivers 340.52. Also, I don't know if it's related at all, but I'm using a dual screen - sometimes it seems some rendering stuff have trouble with that, like Techland's engine?
Thanks a lot :-D There's actually a bit of extra stuff added expressely for the impacts, it's not just in the animations. There's layer upon layer of freeze framing, instant screen shaking (opposed to the visible screen shaking) and some other stuff that adds to the effect. Glad it works :-D
I'll try seeing in the drawers if I've got older stuff for older projects to show, but as far as Honey goes, I only have screens of the very first prototype, like so:
(gonna quote that marvelous stuff to hopefully reduce it's size)
Oh, and here's one for the history books: the only gif I have of the prototype for my previous project, the one I started Honey Rose to work on animation for!
http://gfycat.com/LazyBlissfulAmericankestrel
Things changed since then :-D
thanks guys -- this is definitely a challenging problem due to the seemingly random nature of who can run them and who can't, so to anyone who ran the tests please reply or PM me with your system specs so I can get more information -- anyone new who runs the tests please give your specs too.
thanks.
thanks.
zero shift
Banned
It's really amazing how much I've learned about making games over the past few days. I went from knowing nothing to pretty much being able to make my own 2D platformer.
However I do have a bit of a problem. I followed this tutorial on how to create checkpoints.
After I followed the tutorial step by step and played the game, I started noticing that when ever I hit an enemy I just simply respawned to the exact place I just was instantaneously. So I read the comments and did what commenter Odolwa Aztec said. When I implemented his code everything went perfect once I hit the checkpoint. If I got killed, even in the next room I was respawned at the checkpoint. However prior to coming into contact with the checkpoint, the same thing happened as before, I kept respawning immediately where I was after coming into contact with an enemy.
This link has my .gmz file so that someone who has Gamemaker can open it and see what I did wrong. I would greatly appreciate if someone took a little bit of their time to help me out.
So my problem sort of got fixed.
I changed my death script to "room_restart();" to "game_restart();"
Code:
if (global.checkpointR !=0)
{
room_goto (global.checkpointR);
if (object_exists(obj_player))
{
obj_player.x = global.checkpointx;
obj_player.y = global.checkpointy;
}
}
else
{
game_restart();
}That being said it is still odd that the problem even happens at room_restart. I would ask this on the official Gamemaker forums but it's barely even active with the last active post being pretty much a week ago.
legacyzero
Banned
EDIT: I'm an idiot.
We've run into this aswell, some of our players get a white screen and crash. We can't replicate it, even on a wide rage of pcs that we have in our possession.
this is why I want to do console development. XD I just want one box to design for and that's the box, that's it, no variants.
and strangely the specs of peoples machines doesn't seem to be providing a lot of insight, because you see a lot of people with the same thing and one can run it and one can't. there's no real pattern here that I can tell so far.
Very true! We have one guy with an i7, 32gb ram and a gtx770 that can't run the game. And then my core solo laptop with integrated video runs the game at 60fps. Both running win7. GRRR!!!
so what are you going to do?
SeanNoonan
Member
I reckon drivers are a fairly big deal. I mean, it's working totally fine for me, but then I'm on Windows 7 with latest graphics drivers... either way, I assume there are a lot less issues developing for PC than mobilethanks.
honestly I'm currently a bit confused, it's just a big crapshoot who it works for or doesn't work for.
Thankslooks great, love the layering.
!Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8200 @2.33 GHZ
RAM 3 GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit
Graphics Card Nvidia GeForce GT 640 2GB DDR3
All the shaders worked fine for me. Except maybe the chromatic. The picture is shown just as it is in the assets folder, I can't spot any difference at all. But I don't get any error messages.
Hope it helps.
Limanima is now a registered domain!
www.limanima.com.
Nothing much to see at the moment, but when ready, it will include info about my games and my game engine, and possibly a few more things.
I'm planning to launch the site at the same time I will launch my game.
www.limanima.com.
Nothing much to see at the moment, but when ready, it will include info about my games and my game engine, and possibly a few more things.
I'm planning to launch the site at the same time I will launch my game.
All this PC testing shows some of the drawbacks this space has, so many configurations and we're not even getting in to Windows/OSX/Linux differences
Good luck, I'll give the shader stuff a test later on when I have time. Your results so far sound more confusing than helpful in some ways, maybe you should get people to send you a dxdiag as well so you can compare versions etc?
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Tim just chucked up another piece on our dev blog explaining the visual design of Infinity Drive if anyone's interested: http://www.assaultandroidcactus.com/2014/09/to-infinity-and-beyond.html
This was a tricky level/concept to execute but I think it turned out great, using tons of more 'dynamic' elements to give a real sense of progression throughout the infinite gameplay.
Good luck, I'll give the shader stuff a test later on when I have time. Your results so far sound more confusing than helpful in some ways, maybe you should get people to send you a dxdiag as well so you can compare versions etc?
-
Tim just chucked up another piece on our dev blog explaining the visual design of Infinity Drive if anyone's interested: http://www.assaultandroidcactus.com/2014/09/to-infinity-and-beyond.html
This was a tricky level/concept to execute but I think it turned out great, using tons of more 'dynamic' elements to give a real sense of progression throughout the infinite gameplay.
cebri.one
Member
Hi everyone,
I don't know if this is the right thread to post this but a friend of mine has just released his very first android game and he is looking for some feedback ;D. The game is called "Frank in a HOLE" and it's a simple platformer developed on Unity. One of the main features of the game is the control layout which is a bit diferrent from what is usually used in most mobile games.
Here are some animated gifs.
Here is a video of the control layout he has implemented in the game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7JR79nyJTk
The game is already available at the Android Store (free of course ;D)
QRCODE
You can change the language of the game from the settings button.
Any advice/feedback is very much welcomed.
I don't know if this is the right thread to post this but a friend of mine has just released his very first android game and he is looking for some feedback ;D. The game is called "Frank in a HOLE" and it's a simple platformer developed on Unity. One of the main features of the game is the control layout which is a bit diferrent from what is usually used in most mobile games.
Here are some animated gifs.
Here is a video of the control layout he has implemented in the game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7JR79nyJTk
The game is already available at the Android Store (free of course ;D)
QRCODE
You can change the language of the game from the settings button.
Any advice/feedback is very much welcomed.
Hi IndieGAF, I was going to post this as a new topic, but as a solo developer, this seems like the right place to ask.
Some backstory: I studied game development at university, going down the programming route and was awarded a 2:1. However, the problem was that I left upper education with an extremely weak portfolio that would make breaking into the mainstream gaming industry rather difficult.
As a result of that, some difficult personal issues and a year+ stretch of unemployment, any programming skill I learned during uni has mostly evaporated in a puff of apathy and frustration. I'd still like to get back into things, so I have some questions about getting started again.
My programming experience is limited to C++ & C#/XNA, with PC, GBA & PS3 as development platforms.
Engine Choice
I'm interested in developing a 2D management sim. I have a copy of GameMaker and I'm slowly learning Unity. Should I stick with what I've got or investigate another engine?
Placeholder Art
I'm not an artist by any means. I'm absolutely terrible at both 2D and 3D art, does anyone have any advise about using placeholder art?
Where to Start
One of the biggest problems I've had with projects in the past is where to actually begin? Framework? State engine? Game logic? I know I've done this stuff in the past but I feel like I've forgotten it all.
Any help is appreciated.
Some backstory: I studied game development at university, going down the programming route and was awarded a 2:1. However, the problem was that I left upper education with an extremely weak portfolio that would make breaking into the mainstream gaming industry rather difficult.
As a result of that, some difficult personal issues and a year+ stretch of unemployment, any programming skill I learned during uni has mostly evaporated in a puff of apathy and frustration. I'd still like to get back into things, so I have some questions about getting started again.
My programming experience is limited to C++ & C#/XNA, with PC, GBA & PS3 as development platforms.
Engine Choice
I'm interested in developing a 2D management sim. I have a copy of GameMaker and I'm slowly learning Unity. Should I stick with what I've got or investigate another engine?
Placeholder Art
I'm not an artist by any means. I'm absolutely terrible at both 2D and 3D art, does anyone have any advise about using placeholder art?
Where to Start
One of the biggest problems I've had with projects in the past is where to actually begin? Framework? State engine? Game logic? I know I've done this stuff in the past but I feel like I've forgotten it all.
Any help is appreciated.
Good job. :+
We've got a couple ideas, mostly with threading that we're going to try and test out on a few machines. Fingers crossed it'll work :|
Want to hear something really fun? Tales of game development, I guess.
Soon after we released our first game, we had a few random people told us that the game was chugging for them, like unplayably slow. Their specs were insane. i7, 16GB Ram, 700 series GTX, etc. etc. and it was chugging like nobody's business. This was back when we were only doing XNA development, so we chalked it up to some bad XNA libraries or something we had distributed. Told him to uninstall and re-install the XNA redists and all that jazz. Try to get them from the website. Fresh install, etc., etc. No luck.
A while later, a few more people came forward with similar issues. All had seemingly great specs and we could see absolutely no reason why this was happening. We weren't on Steam yet, so the reports just kind of trickled in as we gained more users. We estimated it was happening to about 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 people.
Finally, the day before we launched on steam I figured it out by a stroke of luck. All the people running into this issue were from Europe, and using a European configuration of Windows. This caused decimals in our scripting language to parse as whole numbers. I.e. 2.5 parsed as 25 because in many places in Europe, the comma is used instead of a period to denote decimals. This carries over to some configurations of Windows. So our script parser (which used .NET libraries, basically part of windows) was throwing out this "junk" decimal point because in EU that doesn't mean anything in numbers. This caused our scripting language to run ungodly slow because we used a multitude of Wait(x) statements, frequently with decimal time. But, Wait(2.5) was being considered Wait(25) (25 seconds!) and so forth. Anyway, we fixed it with an easy workaround, but god did that plague us for the longest time. Such a simple problem, too.
Anyway, moral of the story, sometimes specs have little to do with the issue and it's really a system config thing that your somehow not accounting for. Granted, for more out-of-the-box engines like Unity this shouldn't happen as much, but it still does. And it's a pain in the ass.
Regardless, good luck and such. I'd be happy to test it out on my other rig at home. I've only ever played on my laptop, which ran super smooth.
BlazeHedgehog
Member
Hi everyone,
I don't know if this is the right thread to post this but a friend of mine has just released his very first android game and he is looking for some feedback ;D. The game is called "Frank in a HOLE" and it's a simple platformer developed on Unity. One of the main features of the game is the control layout which is a bit diferrent from what is usually used in most mobile games.
Here some animated gifs.
Here is a video with the control layout he has implemented in the game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7JR79nyJTk
The game already available at the Android Store (free of course ;D)
QRCODE
You can change the language of the game from the settings button.
Any advice/feedback is very much welcomed.
Neat, I had an idea for a platformer control scheme similar to this once.
I think you'll find that programming is kind of like riding a bike. The principles stay with you, even if you might forget some of the low level semantics, but all that stuff is easy to catch up on thanks to Google anyway.
Don't be discouraged if you're finding it hard to get back into, you still have that foundation, you just need a bit of time to get back up to speed. I think Unity is a great choice, and it's good that you have C# experience. Although I do hear Unreal 4 is supposed to have decent support for 2D games.
Placeholder art is fine as long as you keep it internal. I honestly use whatever I find amusing at the time (lots of Simpsons pictures). Use placeholder while you're prototyping, and when you have something cool to show, try and find an artist who's interested in helping out.
As for where to start... I'd suggest just making something. But keep it TINY in scope so that you can actually finish it. Just hack it together and get your mojo back, don't even worry about best practices. I find just being able to make something is very encouraging.
Then after that, you can look into tutorials and focus more on learning best practices. Digital Tutors is supposed to have a lot of good stuff.
Hope that helps!
All worked fine here on my old 32-bit XP machine running a GeForce GTX 285 with the 5/19/2014 drivers. Also worked fine on my 64-bit Windows 7 laptop with a GeForce 750m and latest driers (and I made sure to manually tell each one to run on the NVidia card, because by default the laptop wanted to just use the crappy onboard Intel for them, but the Intel ran them fine too when I tried it).
I feel for you man, I really do. As the programmer, dealing with technical issues that only happened on machines I didn't have access to was the single most stressful thing about being an indie dev thus far.
I was so stressed out when we were about to release Volgarr with what could come up, and then of course stuff like this DID come up, that my wife wasn't sure I was going to survive our release window and suggested I may need therapy. I'd say its the worst part about being an indie dev. Fortunately, at least a lot of you aren't running a custom self-written c++ engine like I was, but instead using something like Unity, so a lot of the stuff I had to deal with shouldn't be a problem with a stock game engine used by lots of other games...
Ah that must have been really frustrating to find right at the end. We'll DEFINITELY look into this, as some of our problems have been from folks in Europe! It'd be great to get some more testers with nvidia cards as we only have integrated and ATI to test on.
bumpkin
Member
Okay, so I've been working on adding some simple mini-games/activities to an iPhone App of mine and right now, they're all silent; you do stuff and the game reacts, but there are no audible effects to their actions. Since I'm not really a "sound guy", I was wondering if anyone who is that's lurking or posting in the thread would be willing to help me add some sound to the games.
The three games are a Memory matching game (find the cards that are the same), a tiled picture puzzle (swap pieces 'til it's correct), and a basic trivia game.
If you want more info or are interested in helping, shoot me a PM!
In the interest of full disclosure: The App hasn't sold a ton -- just over 570 units in three years -- so I don't know if this is much of an income opportunity, but I'd be more than willing to give credit where due in the App's "About" area if that's enough.
The three games are a Memory matching game (find the cards that are the same), a tiled picture puzzle (swap pieces 'til it's correct), and a basic trivia game.
If you want more info or are interested in helping, shoot me a PM!
In the interest of full disclosure: The App hasn't sold a ton -- just over 570 units in three years -- so I don't know if this is much of an income opportunity, but I'd be more than willing to give credit where due in the App's "About" area if that's enough.
I think you'll find that programming is kind of like riding a bike. The principles stay with you, even if you might forget some of the low level semantics, but all that stuff is easy to catch up on thanks to Google anyway.
I think Unity is a great choice, and it's good that you have C# experience. Although I do hear Unreal 4 is supposed to have decent support for 2D games.
Placeholder art is fine as long as you keep it internal. I honestly use whatever I find amusing at the time (lots of Simpsons pictures). Use placeholder while you're prototyping, and when you have something cool to show, try and find an artist who's interested in helping out.
As for where to start... I'd suggest just making something. But keep it TINY in scope so that you can actually finish it. Just hack it together and get your mojo back, don't even worry about best practices. I find just being able to make something is very encouraging.
Then after that, you can look into tutorials and focus more on learning best practices. Digital Tutors is supposed to have a lot of good stuff.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for the support, it's much appreciated!
Jacksinthe
Banned
Okay, so I've been working on adding some simple mini-games/activities to an iPhone App of mine and right now, they're all silent; you do stuff and the game reacts, but there are no audible effects to their actions. Since I'm not really a "sound guy", I was wondering if anyone who is that's lurking or posting in the thread would be willing to help me add some sound to the games.
The three games are a Memory matching game (find the cards that are the same), a tiled picture puzzle (swap pieces 'til it's correct), and a basic trivia game.
If you want more info or are interested in helping, shoot me a PM!
In the interest of full disclosure: The App hasn't sold a ton -- just over 570 units in three years -- so I don't know if this is much of an income opportunity, but I'd be more than willing to give credit where due in the App's "About" area if that's enough.
If you are looking for quick and dirty:
http://www.bfxr.net/
http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html
I'm a bit too wrapped up in my own stuff to throw out custom audio but give those a shot!
I wrote an article about the procedural animation system I've developed for my VR projects, including Ocean Rift for the Gear VR.
http://www.roadtovr.com/the-need-for-procedural-animation-in-virtual-reality-ocean-rift-developer/
That is very, very cool. Great end results on the animations, they look so natural.
yeah, it's definitely an appealing thing about such a well resourced engine as unity. I'm using stencyl, and I've alerted the stencyl staff to this and they're trying to figure it out. they're a small team, though -- I feel like it'll be worked out eventually (stuff tends to get worked out if the desire is there) but it adds to my anxiety nonetheless.
ShadowLag
Member
I thought I'd post this here seeing as I can't make new threads yet and I didn't see anyone mention this: Sony has just open-sourced their general purpose level editor that their worldwide studios use (Naughty Dog, Bend, etc.)
Check it out here: https://github.com/SonyWWS/LevelEditor
It's suited for any game engine, you just have to write plugins and define custom objects for it to get what you want. There's a wiki page at that link too for those looking to do such things and learn the ins and outs of the editor.
Open-source me if old.
Check it out here: https://github.com/SonyWWS/LevelEditor
It's suited for any game engine, you just have to write plugins and define custom objects for it to get what you want. There's a wiki page at that link too for those looking to do such things and learn the ins and outs of the editor.
Open-source me if old.
Three main things:
1: digitigrade extends further back
2: shape of coiling at top is different due to number of articulations
3: plantigrade knee sticks up higher out front to make more room for lower leg to pull through
I'm crashing on every test with a 770 in win 8.1.
Full specs are i5 3570k / 12gb ram / gtx 770 4gb / windows 8.1.
With the shaders off I can see the image.
My application log shows Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\nvoglv32.dll.
zero shift
Banned
I had no idea that Game Maker was such a competent tool. I always assumed it could only be used for basic games and go only so far. However it turns out that Hotline Miami 1 +2, Valdis Story, RIsk of Rain, Samurai Gunn, and even the super hyped Hyper Light Drifter are all made/being made in Game Maker.
EDIT - And even RPG Maker has some very respectable game such as To the Moon, Cherry House: Comedy Club, and Always Sometimes Monsters.
EDIT - And even RPG Maker has some very respectable game such as To the Moon, Cherry House: Comedy Club, and Always Sometimes Monsters.
Yeah, it's what I'm using right now. Extremely versatile for 2D stuff, especially with the recentish additions of support for pixel shaders and Spine animations. Exporting to Xbox One and PS4 is also an exciting prospect.
taku
Member
Love it!be careful
(glass wont really be this easy to break)
OccamsBlender
Member
RPG Maker also powers Ib, that insanely popular art gallery horror game.
These games are good not so much because of the tools but because of the care the creators put into making their games. While tools make making games easier, they don't exactly make them easy as thinking up an idea and BOOM! There it is!
TheHollowNight
Member
Starting to mess about with all the shadowing stuff in Pro!
Your test executables also crashed for me with a 560ti, on Windows 8.1 64-bit, driver 340.52. It gave me an access violation error (0xc0000005 accessing 0x00000000) from nvoglv32.dll.
The call stack didn't give much of a clue, but I got curious why it works on some cards but not others, so I ran it using an OpenGL debugger to see which OpenGL command was causing the driver error (the program is called gDEBugger GL).
The good news is I think I found the cause of the crashing on nvidia cards, it basically appears to be an issue with trying to read vertex data outside the range of the bound vertex buffer object. I assume it won't crash on certain drivers because they handle the error differently (either the driver corrects the stride before submission, or allocates VBOs in larger chunks, or just ignores the violation). I'm not sure how much the following will mean to you, so you might want to pass it on to the guys who make Stencyl that're trying to fix it for you. It is based upon the "contrast" dan test.exe, but I also checked "bloom" and the only difference was VBO 6 uses interleaved access instead of 7.
The error occurs when the exe tries to draw the full screen quad used to apply your postprocess shader. The specific call that crashes the GL driver is:
Code:
glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 6)
Code:
glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 7);
glVertexAttribPointer(0, 2, GL_FLOAT, FALSE, 16, 0x00000000); //position
glVertexAttribPointer(1, 2, GL_FLOAT, FALSE, 16, 0x00000008); //texcoordIf the stride is corrected to 8 bytes then it should stop the crashes when the draw call is issued. I'll try to explain why.
The vertex buffer object being set in the first line is VBO number 7, and the vertex attributes that VBO 7 contains are interleaved. Interleaved means the attribute data is ordered by vertex, not by attribute type. So the order of the attribute data in the VBO is position0, texcoords0, position1, texcoords1, ... position5, texcoords5. Both of the attribute types consist of only 2 float values, so for the position attributes its X and Y, and for the texcoords it's U and V. Each float is a 32 bit data type, and there are 8 bits to a byte, so each attribute's size is 32/8 * 2 = 8 bytes.
You can see glVertexAttribPointer is then called twice, once for each attribute type (position and texcoord). Both of the attributes consist of 2 components (the second parameter), and both attribute's components are of type GL_FLOAT (third param). That's consistent with the VBO data just described.
The intent of the fifth parameter, the stride, is to say how much data to step over when attributes are interleaved in the same VBO, so that only the single attribute type is read. In the case of the position attribute you need to step over the texcoords in the VBO, which we know (from both the VBO data and also the second glVertexAttribPointer call in the next line) consists of 2 float components, which is 8 bytes.
So, the post processing draw call errors because it's vertex shader is trying to read up to 136 bytes into a VBO that is actually only 96 bytes long. I inspected VBO 7 to make sure and it is only made of 96 bytes of data (i.e. 12 pairs of float values). I took a screenshot to make it a bit clearer how the problem is occuring:
http://min.us/i/bgcsshU5i29l6
It shows 4 different windows. The bottom right window shows (in the red boxes) the GL commands - the problematic calls that set the vertex array stride to 16 and attempts to draw using 6 vertices. The bottom left window shows the bound VBO viewed with stride 16 and you can see that doesn't provide 6 vertices of position data, only 4. The upper left shows the same VBO with correct stride of 8 and that it provides 6 vertices of position data (the green boxes).
The upper right window highlights a non-fatal error in the vertex shader, which shouldn't cause a crash, but it describes the position attribute as a vec4 when it should be a vec2 (it doesn't matter so much because only x and y values are used from the attribute, that is, the vec4 is being used like a vec2 so no bad data is actually read).
As an aside, a possibly more performant way to fix the problem, rather than correcting the stride, is to use the VBO data as a single non-interleaved vec4 attribute array (stride 0), with texcoord U and V accessed as aVertex.z and aVertex.w in the vertex shader.
Hope this helps!
Your game's artwork is just soooooooo goooood. The shadows really improve the atmosphere of that scene.
Going to unity pro was definitely a huge improvement, awesome work!
Good gravy, what an awesome response. I'm not involved in the project, but kudos to you for taking so much time to look into it and reply.
May I ask what tools you used for this sort of debugging? Or did you look at the shader source directly?
It actually took more time to explain than to look into! I'm not used to OpenGL terminology, since I learnt about GPU programming with DX11, but the concepts are fairly similar. I just hope it actually proves useful for Jobbs.
I googled "opengl debugger" this lunchtime and gDEBugger was the second result, so that's what I used. I set it to Analyze Mode and stepped through that executable's GL calls until it crashed.
That program lets you look at the shader code since GLSL shaders are compiled at runtime by the GL driver (as opposed to DirectX's HLSL shaders which are usually distributed already compiled into a sort of vendor-agnostic bytecode).
WOW best response I've ever seen from a tester! Remind me to invite you to any beta tests I have in the future!
zero shift
Banned
I realize that. I just didn't know that those software could go so far. All I remember from RPG Maker when I used it when I was 14 was that it was difficult to make anything that wasn't a RPG or a Visual Novel. I couldn't have imagine making a game like To the Moon with the software.
What would be the advantages of using something such as say Unity over Game Maker? Is it just easier to code?
AcceptableGhost
Member
Me and a friend threw up an old game I made onto Steam Greenlight:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=308977809
Figured we would throw it up while we are working on a game that will take a fair amount of time.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=308977809
Figured we would throw it up while we are working on a game that will take a fair amount of time.
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