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Baker Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1538 |

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 8:40 am Post subject: Game Engine = non-linear media player; too hard |

A game engine is like a movie player except that it gets judged by the ability to be presentation to interactive storyline, hopefully with a lot of environment. I think it is rather disappointing how difficult they are to use and how much experience is required to modify them and how many of them have gaping holes in their functionality.
Quake has it better than most.
People like LordHavoc, Spike, div0 and others have redesigned the insides of the engines to get things more streamlined.
But I see some things that are a painful reminder of how primitive all the game engines are:
1. A lot of maps are made for Quake. Most of them are glquake compatible. Which means 1996 era functionality, which is fine except this means that no true progress has been made.
Quake2 can do non-linear play from map to map, for example. In Quake, monsters only know attacking and idling -- you can't have some monsters guarding something valuable (they won't guard it unless it is a Chthon who simply isn't mobile), but that's ok because Quake can't do inventory either. Or NPCs or events (well simple events are ok).
But there isn't anything about map editors that wouldn't support more immersive environments.
2. You see a lot of beautiful deathmatch maps for games. Most of these maps are made by people who know jack shit about deathmatch. They want to use the talent, but have no outlet to do anything creative with it so they made a recycle bin deathmatch map because they can't use those amazing skills to make an immersive single player experience.
3. You see people retexture and remodel things that don't really need retextured or remodelled. Again, there isn't an obvious better way to express the creativity, so they do what is available.
4. I've been spending time examining the source code of a lot of non-Quake engines lately. For the most part, I find it disappointing that many of them are far more of a mess than you'd think. Maybe the maturity of the Quake derived engines has led to more "care" and refinement of the source? And that only people who like working with the source code are doing so?
Random Thoughts
1. A CSQC campfire tutorial that emits smoke would be very cool.
2. I've looked at the Feral source and was hoping that the weapon-in-hand stuff was "better" than the vwep stuff in Quakeworld and in some ways it is (from a creation standpoint), but I see the xyz + angles are hardcoded. I guess md3 is really the only answer.
3. sbar.c is quite a mess in the engine in that it is very inappropriate for so much game logic to be hard coded into the engine. CSQC wins again.
4. Structurally, I wonder what the right way to keep to administrative QuakeC code out of the game logic is. Maybe the Nexuiz peeps have thought about this and I should look at that.
5. I'll know it is a better world when a single player equivalent of Nexuiz exists. You can tell something is in it's infancy when it relies on human players to play each other skipping over the design and story elements. I'm referring to the state of open source games in general, not Nexuiz which has done a fine job of advancing ideas into the world.
6. One reason I've been so intrigued by Half-Life over the last 6 months or so is that they invested a lot of time and energy into supporting more complicated plots and storyline elements for modders -- barely above the Quake threshold. id Software for the most part didn't advance the concept of single player after Quake 2.

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Urre Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 1073 Location: Sweden |

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 9:15 am Post subject: |

Some of your points are made moot by the fact that you can modify the QuakeC to do the things you figure id did wrong with Quake. _________________ Look out for Twigboy

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Spirit Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 476 |

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 9:59 am Post subject: |

I'd say Cube/Sauerbraten is pretty much like Nexuiz but singleplayer. _________________ Quake Maps

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scar3crow Inside3D Staff Joined: 18 Jan 2005 Posts: 837 Location: Las Vegas, NV

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 3:54 pm Post subject: |

Non-linearity is a lot more than having multiple load points in the completion of a designated task, it is more to do with being able to meaningfully apply your own method to that task - and on that, the majority of games fail, as it takes more work, but also because they feel they need to, in any way, compete with the movie industry, which is a very passive very consumed form of entertainment (something which I feel is a foolish thing to do).
I think I just tend to scoff at the notion of advancing 'plots and storyline elements', as this has led to nothing but pure consumption of the game, rather than playing a role in it. From Half-Life/2's "lock the player in a room full of NPCs and have them talk at him" to Doom3's "Heres a recording, the only thing of gameplay relevance is a three digit number, the rest is just filler, which you might enjoy" to Call of Duty 4's "hit the Use key on the glowing mesh, and follow the compass" while simply receiving the storyline via cut sequences, and NPCs talking to each other, before they open the door for you.
I think Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Blood and Diablo do a better job of telling the story than any of the Great Singleplayer Games made in the past 10 years. In those, you are given a goal, a motivator, and then you tell the story with your player actions - usually this story is simple, because... these are all action games. They aren't amazingly deep stories, but they are good motivators, good compellers of exploration. They are simple because the world interaction is simple (though I would argue that in Duke Nukem and Blood, the interaction is far deeper than the products of Valve or Infinity Ward); they aren't deep teachings coupled with good action and atmosphere (such as we see in the Lord of the Rings series, which though still a consumable medium, has a lot more to digest than most which still contain the basal entertainment value of running around killing things).
Or maybe I'm just surly because I finished CoD4 last night, and it reminded me of those great failures by Valve and many other companies, which are quickly becoming the trend, all the while games where the player is actually at least a partial mover in the world, are considered 'ancient.'
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Irritant Joined: 19 May 2008 Posts: 115 Location: Maryland |

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 4:45 pm Post subject: |

The Quake based engines are certainly easier to create assets for, but as you progress towards the more modern engines, it gets more difficult. It was very easy to create content for Quake. Alot of nice tools were made that simplified the process. As the engine advanced, so did the assets, and they became harder to work with. Quake 2 was slightly harder to work with than Quake, and Quake 3 was harder to work with than Quake2(mostly dealing with the model formats). All of these seemed easy compared to working with the UT engines, IMO.
Many Quake based engines have been heavily refined. The best work I've seen is by Jay Dolan in Quake2world. That is the most efficient coding of any of the Quake based engines, by far. He did it the right way - by rewriting all of the base rendering code before adding in the more advanced features.
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MauveBib Joined: 04 Nov 2004 Posts: 602 |

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 5:29 pm Post subject: |

I too am not keen on linear trainline gameplay. It's perfectly possible to tell a story in a game without forcing the player to stand in a room and be talked at, and it's also perfectly possible to make less linear levels and tell a story. See the thief series, where each level is very open (though played in sequence) and the pretty deep stories are slowly revealed by overeard conversations, scraps of diaries etc.
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FrikaC Site Admin Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 947 |

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 7:58 pm Post subject: |

I believe the reason people make deathmatch maps or "remodel things that don't need remodeling" is otherwise they'd need to depend upon a team to accomplish something. It sounds reasonable on paper - the rewards seem greater than working in obscurity by yourself, but the reality is there's a lot of factors working against that kind of collaboration.
Typically, there's a game design war where no one can actually agree on what you are making. In the amateur game communities, people are beholden to no one. No one has any particular authority over where the project goes you are all "just some guy on the internets". The only reason each person is cooperating is because they want to see the final results. However, everyone's opinion of what makes a game great are not universally shared, and invariably somewhere along the road there will be a disagreement over some minor or major detail. In game companies there is a chain of command and a paycheck to hold it all together. If the underlings disagree there's not much they can really do about it.
Ultimately everyone who goes out and makes content or mods for games is either in it to put their work out there or to create something they will enjoy and hope others will enjoy. Both motives are fairly selfish if you think about it. But we are human, and we are nothing if not selfish. As selfish beings, we usually evaluate teams as a potential chain around our neck that, at best, restrict us from what we want to make (our ideas) and at worst can drag us to the bottom (completely fail, losing all the hard work we put into the project).
As a result people will usually express themselves in a way disconnected from other people and other people's content and ideas - deatmatch maps is one way to steer clear of other people's content, standalone models ala Quake 2/3's player models is another. The communities around those content types exist because they need to rely on no one to get their content out there and to garner the recognition they desire.
There's three ways to sidestep this:
1. Pay people, this is how game companies do it, by paying people they can struggle through and get over ideas they do not like by virtue of hey, I'm getting paid to do it.
2. Have a really great idea. A few people who are so in love with a concept may sign on. The great idea needs to be presented in such a way that it's plainly obvious to interested parties it will be great and they're willing to sign on to be a part of it. Mindcrime did this with Nehahra and the mapping community by having a mod and maps to show them, and by tapping into something they all liked anyway - Quake. Typically just espousing the idea will not be enough, it needs to be demonstrable and the idea needs to have a broad appeal yet not be too bland.
3. Have a bond with someone that goes beyond "I'm a mapper, you're a coder, we're both on these forums.". Real life friends & family members are much less likely to fracture and more likely to find agreement on project ideas.
So again to reiterate and go back to my fundamental point which I think I may have lost or assumed was understood - to make an immersive story driven project you probably need a team of people to accomplish it. Teams are hard to come by and are generally in disagreement over precisely the things you talked about. On top of that, trying to get three people to agree on a story is nearly impossible. For a singleplayer project you'll also encounter the time budget problem - people only have a set number of hours of available time to devote to projects - large projects such as a single player projects have needs disproportionate to the time and talent available to the team making it.
In the end, even if you make it through all the hurdles people will eventually get tired with the idea and would rather work on something that has a quicker turnaround. Something they can spend a mere weekend on and release it. Or they may see the project 'stagnating' and abandon it like last week's bread.

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Baker Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1538 |

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 12:37 am Post subject: |

Spirit wrote:
I'd say Cube/Sauerbraten is pretty much like Nexuiz but singleplayer.

Do you enjoy playing it? I don't.
Don't get me wrong, I'd back anything with enjoyable game play.

FrikaC wrote:
1. Pay people, this is how game companies do it, by paying people they can struggle through and get over ideas they do not like by virtue of hey, I'm getting paid to do it. 2. Have a really great idea. A few people who are so in love with a concept may sign on. The great idea needs to be presented in such a way that it's plainly obvious to interested parties it will be great and they're willing to sign on to be a part of it. Mindcrime did this with Nehahra and the mapping community by having a mod and maps to show them, and by tapping into something they all liked anyway - Quake. Typically just espousing the idea will not be enough, it needs to be demonstrable and the idea needs to have a broad appeal yet not be too bland.

I agree with all of this of course.
I'm trying to think of a scenario or set of circumstances that will allow the individual or small team of amateurs accomplish what they'd like to do.
With professional development, the direction still comes in the form of the guy writing the paychecks.

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reckless Joined: 24 Jan 2008 Posts: 390 Location: inside tha debugger |

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 3:46 am Post subject: |

reminds me of zerstoerer. some features i wasnt even aware the quake engine was displayed in that mod, story wasnt to bad either alltho the end kinda made me laugh "splat". if id have to go for originality id say nehahra and the above takes the cake . nehahra while maybe not looking overly clean has some witty
cutscenes. also quite impressive that they could make the characters speak "as in lip moves" in modern days like now where we have md3 skeletal models etc id say it could be pretty damn interresting recreating it

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Spirit Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 476 |

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 8:53 am Post subject: |

Baker wrote:

Spirit wrote:
I'd say Cube/Sauerbraten is pretty much like Nexuiz but singleplayer.

Do you enjoy playing it? I don't.

Nope, but I don't enjoy Nexuiz either. After my overly enthusiastic first impression faded away I realised how completely random and stupid it plays.
There is not much that is wrong with Sauerbraten for me though. Being pushed back by weapons is silly. Some of the monsters are crudely animated and (I think) the damage feedback isn't working for me. And the movement is kinda weird (well, everything not Quake is weird to me, heh).
Plus so far all levels I played where either dmsp or incredibly hard.
One could make a great game with what Sauerbraten already has.
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Baker Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1538 |

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:26 am Post subject: |

Spirit wrote:

Baker wrote:

Spirit wrote:
I'd say Cube/Sauerbraten is pretty much like Nexuiz but singleplayer.

Do you enjoy playing it? I don't.

Nope, but I don't enjoy Nexuiz either. After my overly enthusiastic first impression faded away I realised how completely random and stupid it plays.
There is not much that is wrong with Sauerbraten for me though. Being pushed back by weapons is silly. Some of the monsters are crudely animated and (I think) the damage feedback isn't working for me. And the movement is kinda weird (well, everything not Quake is weird to me, heh).
Plus so far all levels I played where either dmsp or incredibly hard.
One could make a great game with what Sauerbraten already has.

I root for projects like Sauerbraten to succeed and wanted to like it. The menu options are crazy. Why is everyone making games with 500 things in the menu -- I don't know of any actually successful games with that many options.
I do kind of like playing Nexuiz except for the FPS issue. The fps issue assures I don't play it (well that and the load times are crazy).
Playability and usability are very important and neither game has either, but both have good ideas. Nexuiz has a lot of modding ideas under the hood and Sauerbraten has some very nice effects, obviously.
Some day, someone somewhere is going to make something nice that works like it is supposed to on every computer like it is supposed to that isn't too thin or too fat and falls right in the mainstream.
To me, a modern world should mean an easy one. Some people may laugh at this next statement, but a quality well-rounded and easy to develop for game engine is a very important technology for the world.
Most of the books in a library are fiction and almost every movie is fiction as well. I would like to live in a world where people can make some mindblowing games easily (no I don't mean graphics and effects although that too, I mean the realization of a story or a concept).
I have a feeling in 20 years there will some dominant game engine that is the equivalent of, say, FireFox and there will be multiple competing game engines that can all run the same games.
Seriously.
The future always favors consolidation around standards and something will emerge as the lingua franca of game development.

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Jehar Joined: 22 Oct 2006 Posts: 9 Location: Califonia |

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 11:05 am Post subject: Re: Game Engine = non-linear media player; too hard |

Baker wrote:
A game engine is like a movie player except that it gets judged by the ability to be presentation to interactive storyline, hopefully with a lot of environment.

I think you have it backwards - a game engine presents an environment that may have varying levels of interaction. A linear development (movie) may be one of those interactions. However, it could just as easily be a totally passive environment that can be explored freely with no narrative or conflict. At it's core, that it what a game engine does - it renders environments. Everything else like AI, scripting, physics, etc, is built upon this basis.

Quote:
I think it is rather disappointing how difficult they are to use and how much experience is required to modify them and how many of them have gaping holes in their functionality. Quake has it better than most.

Programs are going to be programs - simulating reality (to whatever extent) is no easy task. The more accurate the simulation, the more complex the program will tend to be. Add in plenty of variation for how each programmer postulates his theories and representations to be superior. The fact that it requires experience is no mistake - a good painted portrait requires just as much experience; they don't happen by lucky mistake.

Quote:
People like LordHavoc, Spike, div0 and others have redesigned the insides of the engines to get things more streamlined.

Don't misinterpret their intentions - most source ports are designed to remove bugs and improve upon existing features so as to make the core experience better - not change it into something else.

Quote:
1. A lot of maps are made for Quake. Most of them are glquake compatible. Which means 1996 era functionality, which is fine except this means that no true progress has been made. Quake2 can do non-linear play from map to map, for example. In Quake, monsters only know attacking and idling -- you can't have some monsters guarding something valuable (they won't guard it unless it is a Chthon who simply isn't mobile), but that's ok because Quake can't do inventory either. Or NPCs or events (well simple events are ok).

Again, many people like the core gameplay of Quake. It's primal, and flexible enough through scripting to have some real fun with getting it to do new tricks. The technological challenge of this is noteworthy and often commendable. No "progress" must be made; there's no golden future of the Quake engine. People use the Quake engine to play Quake and make Quake mods. If they want something with more gui features, ai scripts, etc, then most people do the logical thing and switch to an engine with better support for those things. Adding them to Quake proper may be a viable exercise, but most people are intelligent enough to know what an engine is inherently good at, and what it's not as good at.

Quote:
2. You see a lot of beautiful deathmatch maps for games. Most of these maps are made by people who know jack shit about deathmatch. They want to use the talent, but have no outlet to do anything creative with it so they made a recycle bin deathmatch map because they can't use those amazing skills to make an immersive single player experience.

Mapping is expressive. If you want to make an epic single-player level that takes the player through jaw-dropping landscapes, go for it. If you want to make something really realistic at the expense of gameplay-centric flow, that's cool too. If you just want to make a bunch of cool shapes and colors, there are circles for that too. People will map however they want to, and for whatever purpose. From what I can see, there are plenty enough of just about every persuasion that we can all find some circle to call our own. So those beautiful deathmatch maps may be more for the purpose of being beautiful (ie artistic expression) over being functional for deathmatch (form). Also, nobody is making anybody play any maps they don't want to.

Quote:
3. You see people retexture and remodel things that don't really need retextured or remodelled. Again, there isn't an obvious better way to express the creativity, so they do what is available.

While back-ports aren't my favorite, they do indeed provide a challenge to the creators. When Doom3 came out, the Doomworld community pretty quickly jumped at the assets and did an attempt to recreate the D3 experience. Was it meant to be a clone? No. It was intended for the challenge - to make a 15 year-old engine try and match aesthetics with the new-edge technology. Rising to that kind of technical challenge is a hobby many enjoy.

Quote:
4. I've been spending time examining the source code of a lot of non-Quake engines lately. For the most part, I find it disappointing that many of them are far more of a mess than you'd think. Maybe the maturity of the Quake derived engines has led to more "care" and refinement of the source? And that only people who like working with the source code are doing so?

I think one of the simple truths is that there aren't many people who can code like John Carmack.

Quote:
5. I'll know it is a better world when a single player equivalent of Nexuiz exists. You can tell something is in it's infancy when it relies on human players to play each other skipping over the design and story elements. I'm referring to the state of open source games in general, not Nexuiz which has done a fine job of advancing ideas into the world.

What story elements? Nexuiz is a deathmatch game. That's what it's designed for. Every game can't encompass everything within a single design - they have to aim to hit a finite goal. Many people like deathmatch. Therefore, there are several pure deathmatch games. If you want to use the Nexuiz assets to create a single-player experience with whatever story elements you want, feel free to gather a team (you'll need one, we all do these days), and just do it. Nobody is going to stop you, and you'll probably get plenty of attention and accolation from the community if you do a good job.

Quote:
6. One reason I've been so intrigued by Half-Life over the last 6 months or so is that they invested a lot of time and energy into supporting more complicated plots and storyline elements for modders -- barely above the Quake threshold. id Software for the most part didn't advance the concept of single player after Quake 2.

There's nothing in HL that you can't do in Doom as far as narrative goes, but that's a purely technical point. Again, I draw attention to the intended design goals. The folks at id tend to like pure run-and-gun primal rocketfests, so that was the center of the design. Whatever Gabe Newell likes became the center of his design. I'm still not sure after all these years what exactly that was, but to each his own. My point is that every game can't be every game. A hardcore dungeon crawl can't waste too much time on chatting up the local bar wench so that he can get a couple gold off of his beer tab. That is, unless the game design calls for it.
Focus is the key word here. Every project has to have some focal point of interaction and end-user experience. People will buy Diablo if they want hack-and-slash number-driven demon fighting. People will buy Roller Coaster Tycoon for the simulationist and managerial qualities.
If there's a vision for a style of game narrative that you hold, find the right technology and use it. If you can do it in Quake, cool. If not, use something better suited to the intended design.

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SamUK Joined: 17 Dec 2008 Posts: 98 Location: United Kingdom |

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 1:49 pm Post subject: Re: Game Engine = non-linear media player; too hard |

The whole idea of video games is to be entertaining, back when quake came out there was nothing like it, but since the release of Half-life we all come to expect good singleplayer story's. Games such as Mass Effect had great gameplay but the reason I finished it twice was to see how I could effect the story each time. I could not imagine playing

Quote:
There's nothing in HL that you can't do in Doom as far as narrative goes, but that's a purely technical point. Again, I draw attention to the intended design goals. The folks at id tend to like pure run-and-gun primal rocketfests, so that was the center of the design. Whatever Gabe Newell likes became the center of his design. I'm still not sure after all these years what exactly that was, but to each his own. My point is that every game can't be every game. A hardcore dungeon crawl can't waste too much time on chatting up the local bar wench so that he can get a couple gold off of his beer tab. That is, unless the game design calls for it.

I cant agree with that, the first ever true story in a game was Half-Life, since its release nearly every game has had some sort of a deep story/back story. If id wanted a run-and-gun type game they would not have changed the quake formual with quake 4.Doom may have the tools but there must be a reason that nobody has done it yet. Even quake 2 tried adding a story, but without scripted events they struggled so they used video files instead. Storys play a massive part in almost every singleplayer game.
Multiplayer games don't need/have storys but when I select singleplayer I want a story, I want to feel sorry if somebody on myside dies. I want to feel happy when I do something right in the story.
This is just my opinion tho, we are all entitled to our opinions.
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Urre Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 1073 Location: Sweden |

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 3:51 pm Post subject: |

SamUK: Jehar was only pointing out that the HL story would have been possible to make in the Doom engine, in the very same manner even, had id wanted to. But they didn't want to. I also think your views on how story is told in games is rather narrow. To go all mainstream and stupid here, look at Portal. It has no cutscenes, nor does it force the player to wait for a door to open while listening to NPC's whine, or having to stop moving to concentrate in case the audio log mentions a number combination you need.
Also, Portals model for storytelling would work great in multiplayer too, and it'd be awesome to see someone do it. There are other ways to do stories in multiplayer games as well, which don't involve a mission statement during the load screen or other lame things like that.
On a side note, everyone needs to stop trashing the Half-Life games for their bad qualities, and appreciate what they're good at. I used to do this hatery a lot too, disregarding the fact that I really enjoyed the experience (mostly). The interactive cutscenes were quickly forgotten by the fact that it's some of the most immersive shit ever, really made me feel like there was a world with lots of stuff going on, which I were a part of. Another game which made me feel this was Unreal. While Quake might be overall better gamplay-wise, the immersion just wasn't there, not even close. And this has nothing to do with how much/little cutscenes you have or if your game is linear or not. Unreal was also linear, but no one ever trashed it for that, probably because you had a lot more room in the overall linear maps (Unreals maps were bleeding massive at the time). I really liked when this was described as the game having "atmosphere", but that term got replaced with immersion at some point, but they're not the same thing. Immersion is a lot harder to achieve than atmosphere. World of Goo has great atmosphere, but I don't exactly feel immersed in it.
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frag.machine Joined: 25 Nov 2006 Posts: 728 |

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 5:28 pm Post subject: |

I agree with Urre about the Half Life series: much of the criticism about it is gratuitous. Valve aimed to tell a story with the Half Life series, and they are delivering that very well so far. At id, they were always centered (and a bit obsessed after the departure of Romero, I must say) about the technology, and Carmack even told once that games are much like porn movies: it's okay if there's a story, but not essential. Well, I suspect that this could be true back in the 90's when Doom/Quake dominated the scene, but things have changed a lot. I believe that a game centered around an engine (like was Doom 3 back then and lately the Crysis series) will always lose to a game centered around a good story (and as consequence of that, the engine development working around the story too, and not the opposite).
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