Whoa, lookit awl dat joos
Lots of stuff has been floating about lately. I’m officially completely off my SWG addiction (seemingly I wasn’t after last post for about a week or two). I’m kinda in that stage where I have all these projects to continue, all these games to play, and all these things to do, but I don’t know which to turn my focus to right now. There’s ToH, EXGN/RP, Espionage Inc, and the periodically reoccuring 3D modeling and animation thing. I know I said I’ve made plans for the new updated EXRP script, and I will get around to that sometime soonish, but I think for now I’ll try to focus on Espionage Inc. Thing is, with such a small team of developers, we all have to do our part–And in some cases, we all have to do multiple parts. Especially me, for some reason. While coding and design are probably enough to keep me occupied, I’m still aiming for a pretty quick development cycle. I’ve started to model again, this time with Modo. It’s really amazing compared to anything else out there. Max was alright, but I didn’t like the way that the modifiers worked. You never really had any real geometry due to them, and when you come down into the technical stuff (and even trying to export things to Source) that was a real pain. Maya was a lot better, but I found it really glitchy. It absolutely loves to bugger out and go completely batshit insane when you hand it some backfaces. Now I’ve started looking into other things, like Blender for instance. Pretty powerful, stable, well-rounded tool, however I just horribly dislike it’s interface and viewport controls. Waaaaaay to complicated and unconventional. Houdini looked nice as well, but it’s node system is just completely unnecessary in my opinion. Lightwave is nice too, but it feels like just more of the same. So eventually I came across Modo, which has this whole philosophy about every concept and control just coming naturally and working how you’d expect them to work. And that’s true, Modo is by far the easiest to use modeling program I’ve ever used–besides Wings, but that’s a bit outdated I think. It’s pretty good at other things to, like texturing, sculpting, and rendering. It has a pretty primitive pivot-based animation system, which is great for smaller things, but for organics I just can’t see it happening. You can, however, animate in an external program and import the MDD. I’ll be doing this if I ever want to do animation (which I will) with another nice program called Messiah. Very very nice animation tools there. Anyway, in addition to modeling I’ll also be taking on the daunting challenge of creating a soundtrack of sorts. I’ve been looking into Reason, which looks really good actually, but the only problem for me is that you really do need a MIDI device for that. Actually, not too big of a problem as I already have a very nice keyboard, but it’s rather large and I’ll have to find a lot of space for it. Plus I’ll need a MIDI input card for my computer, and frankly I know nothing about those. I’m sure it’ll all work out though, I honestly can’t wait until we start getting some more content out.
02.18.09Allayloo ta nuv
Not much development recently, if at all. Espionage Inc is still in a bit of a hiatus, but really I can’t be arsed to pester anyone anymore–at least, not now. ToH is on a bit of a break too; I coded like 24/7 that one week that I’m all ‘coded out’ for a while. EXRP is about the same, as I’ve said in earlier blog posts I’ve just been really bored with GMod/Lua recently. Not to worry, everything will return to activity sooner or later.
So, what’s been going on with me? Both a lot of something and a lot of nothing. I’ve been really frustrated with school, since I was put in a class that I didn’t really want to be in, but was assured it was something completely different than it actually turned out to be, and now it’s too late to get out. Also, did I mention said class requires me to go to school on a couple Saturdays or else I fail–one being my birthday? Yeah, just brilliant. I’ve also been playing a lot of SWG lately, hence the post title. I’ve levelled up quite a lot since I last played, not sure how. It’s pretty awesome though, I have ~500+ DPS without using actions or buffs, a droideka, and I’ve done an assload of “higher-level” quests and instances–my house is full of trophies and crap. Really fun game, it’s a shame to see people leaving it. There was a free week of play last week that I was completely into that just ended today for me that I got really into, and I’m resubscribing when I get home.
One thing that I’ve been playing with lately is something called “theta brainwave meditation”, which is basically ambient music with a soft hum in the background at a certain frequency called ‘theta’ that somehow tricks your brain into becoming more relaxed and everything. You can find some here. If you’re going to go out and buy that track you hear in the video, it’s called Astral Journeys. Very nice easy listening if you ask me, great for getting yourself relaxed after a lot of stress. Anyway, just thought I’d share that with you. If you’re in need of a good game to play, check out SWG. Now then, back to school…
06.28.08WAAAAAAALL-E
I saw WALL-E today, and it was great. And by great, I really, really mean GREAT–and I don’t say this about too many movies. Sure, Iron Man was great, but it didn’t really play with your mind or touch you emotionally and philosphically, giving you a fresh new view on things. Basically, it’s about a robot (WALL-E) who compacts trash on Earth for a living. If I told you anything else, it’d be a spoiler. The concept of the movie is small, yet with the emotion Pixar (somehow) put in all their characters, it just makes the movie so much bigger. I applaud Pixar with that in mind. So, you’re making a movie with robots that can’t talk. Okay. Now how do you show what they’re thinking? How do you show emotion? By having rather extensive and highly movable limbs and eyes that can rotate multiple ways, Pixar was able to put in a lot of emotion into their characters. Robots with effective emotion–who would’ve known?
With that said, the robots don’t exactly behave like robots. They have a certain personification to them that gives them all a distinct personality and attitude. For example, WALL-E is very curious. His lady friend EVE is very directive, as she tells us multiple times. A cleaning robot named Mo is very… Well, cute. The list goes on and on for each character, of course. When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought there would be no humans or talking at all, and that it’d be rather kiddie because of that. I mean, if you can’t talk or anything, why not just do a lot of kiddie humor like bash into walls and stuff? Pixar did a good job of avoiding this. There are humans who talk and play a big part in the movie, and the robots do talk in their own way. Imagine how those voice synthesizers on guitars talk, make it 8-bit, and there you go. To give you a bit of an idea, WALL-E has a lot of trouble saying EVE’s name.
Overall, this was a really good movie. The plot was nice and original enough to be very enjoyable. The humor was really good–maybe a bit better than usual, considering these robots show a lot of emotion. (More than other Pixar characters, as the robots’ emotion was a big aspect of this film.) The character design was just amazing, as is the soundtrack. And as always, breaking their previous record, Pixar’s graphics and rendering are better than ever. Would I recommend you see this movie? Of course! 10/10! At times, it seems a tad bit uninspired with not too much humor, but the majority (being 98%) is absolutely amazing. WALL-E is a great contender for a best animated feature film Oscar–as if there was any competition. Elaborating on the soundtrack a bit more, Thomas Newman is a genius. I’m listening to it right now and especially with this new sound card, my ears are in complete bliss. Now back to the movie, it really has a big philosophical side to it that gets you thinking. What if we really had AI like that? What if what happened to Earth in the movie really did happen? What if we all got fat an immobile!? The main idea is AI that is self-aware, that can think for it’s self, and can have emotion. With that in mind, WALL-E may just be my favourite movie this year.
Really, I wouldn’t mind working for them. Game development being a hobby and Pixar being work would work out perfectly. At Pixar you get to ride scooters and stuff through the halls, they have talent contests, and parties in the lobby whenever a movie opens. You also get to use whatever operating system you want on your computer, and there are no internet filters. If that isn’t already amazing, you get to paint your office whatever colour you want. Sure it’s not that big an office–more like a cubicle in terms of size–but it has walls and it’s own door. Niiiiiice. Now, lets compare that to the gaming industry: You can work for EA or Valve. EA’s working conditions would obviously treat you like utter crap, so I’m not even going to go into that. Valve is more of the “prime realestate”-type when it comes to game development jobs I’d think, and even there I’d think it’d be a bit boring. Sitting in an office all day with internet filters and everything, forced to use Windows. Then you don’t get anything new, it’s just munging around old, probably poorly written code written by someone else. I’ve done a lot of coding myself, and I know that I hate working with other peoples’ code. Therefor, having Pixar as a job and game devleopment as a hobbie, as it is now, would be perfect. That’s my goal/plan, at least. I’m trying to get back into Maya, so hopefully with a little amatuer experience I’ll be ready for Pixar University.
Anyway, other stuff: EXRP’s meeting was moved to Monday because some key members couldn’t come, and that’s fine. It would’ve been nice to have it today, but then I would’ve wanted to see WALL-E today anyway (which I didn’t realize on Thursday when I scheduled the meeting originally) so that would’ve conflicted and screwed things up. On monday my family has to take our car to the shop ’cause the wheels are squeaky, one of the side doors doesn’t lock with the remote, and someone keyed the driver’s door in the theater parking lot today. The latter problem probably isn’t on warranty, which sucks. I wish I had more non-movie stuff to say, but I don’t. WALL-E just blew my mind–go see it, and it’ll blow yours too.
04.20.08My relief
As you most likely know, yesterday was the beginning of the ’semi-public’ testing of EXRP-Script. I say that because it’s passworded, but the password is on exrp.ca. I did this so that we don’t get random nubs going in complaining about how “lacking” the beta is. Yeah, nothing ever gets past them.
Anyway, point is, I’m greatly relieved. I thought that, due to lack of content, feedback would be a bit on the negative side. Worst case scenario: People hate EXRP-Script and the idea of ’serious’ character saving, and tell me to revert back to a revamped EXLRP. However, to my relief, feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The only ‘bad’ feedback I got was lack of police and a buy menu–but that’s on it’s way, so everything’s fine. In fact, I found myself in a fairly decent RP, and I’ve had reports of others having some really good RPs as well. Granted, half of the time I’ve been on the server I’ve been toying around with my 5-second SWEP “minge-gun”, but there was some RP as well. Hey, it’s a beta, it’s not for RPing; it’s for testing.
On the subject of testing, everything went fine–or at least, it’s fine now. I had a lot of trouble putting the gamemode onto a dedicated server, as I was testing it only on a listen before. A lot of the bindings for dedicated servers are different than that of a listen, and are a lot more ’strict’ or ‘option explicit’. It was just a matter of fixing all those qwerks and fixing a couple things I had added without testing, and now everything’s fine. However, there are two bugs that I don’t think I’ll be able to fix. The first one happens only when you have an obscene amount of money, and that causes subtracting to not work properly. I don’t know, it makes no sense–it has something to do with the way that networked integers work on dedicated servers. However it isn’t very exploitable and only happens if you have over 20 billion dollars, so I won’t worry about that. The second bug is that you can’t disable keyboard input if mouse input is enabled on a Derma VGUI–which makes no sense either. I’ve done it before, I know it, but it just doesn’t seem to want to work now.
What I’m thinking is instead of a dialpad, a window that pops up and asks you if you want to answer/dial, cancel/ignore, and has a little textbox for typing in a number–similar to that when you want to drop money off the radial menu–which opens when you left-click while you have the phone SWEP out. Other than the VGUI, PhoneMod works just fine, so I won’t bother rewriting the server part of it until I have time. (Or if I find that it’s absolutely neccesarry.)
All in all, we’re almost done. I have only x things to do, and for the most part, they’re pretty easy.
- Classifieds (easy)
- Create ’scripted’ companies (police, fire, ems, etc… easy)
- Create 911 menu (easy… aw hell, i might have to rewrite phm’s server code for this…)
- Buy menus (easy)
- SWEPs and SENTs (easy, but give me ideas. i need previously class-specific things, mostly)
- Inventory (not completely sure how i’ll do this yet)
The only thing I’m really ‘iffy’ about is the inventory–I’m not completely sure how to make it save things to a database. I’m thinking either a seperate table that has three rows, class and value, for the class (weapon_blah, prop_physics, etc…), value (prop_physics model, weapon ammo, etc…), and character ID; or a new row for each character that has the two things seperated by commas and spaces. How that’d work is that we’d have the first set of class and value, seperated by a space, and then the second set, seperated from the first set by a comma. That could work, but it may be a bit of a pain to remove things. On the other hand, the former option would be a lot more unstable and messy. Of course, if you have any ideas, let me know.
Right now I’m not too concerned with the specifics of that, in fact I’m thinking of cutting it from the launch. (Just like stocks are being cut.) Actually, my mind is elsewhere right now; I’m still dwelling on the feedback from yesterday’s tests. It’s just such an amazing relief. Of course, thank you for helping me find bugs and test and whatnot; and thanks for your feedback. From what little RPing I had done, it was great–and I can’t wait to launch and get back into the jist of things. Anyway, stay tuned, I’ll be sure to update my blog as much as possible. My estimation, at the rate I’m going at right now, is about a week. However, I might get distracted and slow down (like before), so take my estimation with a grain of salt (as always).
[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N3N1MlvVc4[/youtube]
No idea why I’m posting this (Mad World by Gary Jules), it’s just such a beautiful sounding song. Just like Speed of Sound by Coldplay. I don’t know why songs like this get me so much, I guess it’s just the relaxing feeling they give off when you listen to them. I still remember a GMod video that had a really great scene at the end of it using Speed of Sound, which was excellent in terms of cinematography. However, the rest of the movie sucked. What gives? They even had a really great scene with a Ravenholm map, but then they ruined it at the last second with GMan spazzing out. What drives people to do this? They make something so perfect, so talented, and then just ruin it in idiocity at the last possible second. Meh, here’s Speed of Sound. ‘Night.
[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMOOHGhB_b4[/youtube]
04.16.08Estimation: Soon!
I know I keep saying soon, but I actually mean it this time. I plan to get some major work done over the weekend, possibly finishing the script. Of course, there’d then be content creation to be done (SWEPs, SENTs, scripted companies, etc…), but those’ll be easy. Hopefully something doesn’t screw up my weekend plans again so I can do this. Also, hopefully I don’t get re-addicted to SWG. I really hope I don’t, or else that’ll be another two weeks… Uurgh….
Today I made major headway on the companies system. I’ve completed everything except the abilities to manage employees and quit/disband the company–which is quite a lot. I still have to do stocks, but I’ll figure that out eventually. I’m not even completely sure how I’ll do it. Perhaps maybe executives can sell these to players as SENTs, and then the player gets a share every X in-game days? That could work–I see no way to make an automated stock market like I’d like to. If you have any ideas, let me know.
Things to do:
- Finish company system (90% done)
- Make classifieds system (extremely easy)
- Make inventory and journal (DICK easy)
- Make buy menus (PISS EASY)
- Make stocks system (should be easy enough)
- Make content (very simple)
Of course, I may cut some of these things from the launch, but this is all I have to do until the script is 100% complete. Yeah, that’s not much is it? I can’t believe we’re so close! Hopefully I can finish mostly everything this weekend so I can begin testing–and that’ll be really fun indeed. I shouldn’t need too much testing done, so it’ll be on a “snooze or lose”-type basis whether you get a chance to test or not. Then I can get a launch date down and we can plan the festivities! …And I can tweak as I usually do. But hey, at least it’ll be done.
If you have any ideas, now would be the time to state them. In response to my last post, I’ve changed things around a bit. You can work without a company, of course, but companies are just for more advanced, more organized jobs with numerous employees and a steady payroll. You’ll be able to edit your job title in your character’s journal however you please–this won’t even show up in many places anyway.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it. I’m really in the zone, and I really want to finally finish this. It’s been so long since I’ve had a proper roleplay–too long. I’m really missing roleplaying with you guys and doing the radio and all. Ah, that was good fun. And it’ll continue to be! The new script heavily depends on player contibution–there’s no automatic payroll. If you ask me, this will be a lot more fun, since there’s going to be an actual economy and stuff. We’re opening a door to a more fun, realistic roleplay, that revolves around you: the players. You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension – a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.
[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzlG28B-R8Y[/youtube]
04.1.08No more Feedburner
Not too much has been going on the past couple days. My spring break is over, so I’m back in school; I’m having the whole tired/depressed thing you get whenever you come back from a vacation, which sucks. Since I play on a Eurpoean SWG server, nobody’s ever on when I am, so I guess the game’s best when you have someone in a similar timezone to play with you, or it’s a weekend. Unfortionately, PP’s internet is down. Makes for a good opportunity to code, though. Speaking of which, I haven’t done too much in the past couple days. Just more tweaking and planning, I’m afraid. I still do want to launch it quite soon, though. I’ve started listening to the same playlist I used on the radio, and that’s got me pretty pumped. I can’t wait to be RPing to epic music like this again.
Oh, also, I got a joystick for space battles in SWG. It’s awesome. There’s a little throttle on the side of it, so it actually feels like I’m pushing a ship’s throttle whenever I wanna go faster or whatnot. It’s a Logitech Attack 3, so the keys weren’t bound properly ingame (no roll axis), so that just took a couple minutes and pestering of Foo to fix, but it’s still much better. Much easier to control.
Anyway, today was basically just a bunch of mooping around being tired from all those late nights during the break and going to school and whatnot. I watched a buncha videos on GameTrailers, and one that caught my eye was the Star Wars Retrospective. I’ve played nearly all of the more recent Star Wars games, so it started getting really good for me near the end of the second episode, where the nostalgia kicked in. Pretty cool, even if I haven’t played most of them. I can’t wait for the next episodes, as they’ll have games I’ve actually played and remember in detail.
I finally got around to adding a favicon for exrp’s site. It took me a while, but I finally realized that we didn’t have one when Firefox randomly gave it Facepunch’s icon. Eww. So yeah, It’s a big “ex” using the same font as the logo, which is kinda neat. My April Fools prank was changing the default forum theme to a really crappy one, which was fun. Some people didn’t seem to understand and thought I was being serious, which was even more fun. I pity the foo’. Not Foo, though.
The Wordpress 2.5 update finally showed up for me today, maybe just because I haven’t checked my admin panel for a couple days, so I’ve installed that. The admin panel looks and functions a lot better, which is nice. I don’t think I’ll need some of the plugins I had before, either, like the Youtube or MP3 ones. I’ll experiment with this later, but I see ‘add video’ and ‘add music’ buttons. Either way, this brings me upon a dilemma. As you might already know, I was trying out Feedburner to manage my RSS and whatnot. It’s pretty useful, as it tells me a couple neat things like how many people are subscribing, but there are Wordpress plugins that already do that. The only thing I can’t do locally is email subscriptions, but nobody uses them anyway–so I’m getting rid of Feedburner. If you’re currently subscribed to Feedburner’s RSS feed for my blog, please resubscribe to this link. I’ve also reset all the other RSS links on the site, and I’ve put my Feedburner in ‘redirection mode’, so be sure to resubscribe! My Feedburner account will close in 30 days once it’s redirection mode thing is expired.
Well, that’s about it. ‘Night!
03.16.08Yippie-ki-yay, motherf*cker!
So I finally saw Live Free or Die Hard. I don’t know what took me so long–I think I was just busy with other things, so I never had the time to watch it in theaters. Oh well. Of course, that would’ve been much better than watching it “on demand”. My parents’ old VCR was screwing up the digital feed from the cable line, causing the picture to turn completely blue every few seconds. Took me a while to figure that one out, but it became obvious once we tried watching it on another TV without an old VCR. Why do we even have a VCR, anyway? I still say we need to go HD, even if the picture quality is 1000000 times better without the VCR plugged in.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. What was I saying? Oh right, movie review. Overall, pretty good. The story was a bit weak, as it was a generic ‘bad guy trying to hold the world for ransom’ type thing, but it was pretty good anyway. At first, it seems a bit cheesy with all the absurdly unrealistic kung-fu, but it seems to dim down and get better after watching for a while. I’d call this movie more of a ’strictly action’ film–you know, the type where you laugh at how badly the antagonists get clobbered. I like it, though. It kept my attention, it was fun, funny, and very action-y. I should’ve seen it in theaters.
Well, I know you don’t come here for random banter about movies–you come here for random banter about progress on EXRP-Script. (or other semi-related things) Progress is…. Well, progressing. I finally finished the receiving end of the mail system after fixing some really nasty bugs, and I’m moving on to the ‘compose’ screen. This should be a lot easier, as it’s just a bunch of DTextEntry’s that send information through concommands, then saving that information into the database. And don’t get any funny ideas from that–I’ll be sure to escape my MySQL stuffs.
As for my sleeping/coding theory from last post, it’s been proven incorrect. However, I have a new one: I get pumped whenever I listen to the Tomorrowland background music from Disney World. Yeah, strange, I know, but it works. Maybe just because I’ve had so many good memories there, the nostalgia comes up and makes me happy, putting me in a better mood for coding? I don’t know, and I don’t intend to. I stick with what works, and apparently this does. It’s just really calming, I know that much. You can listen to a small clip of it below.
…And that’s about it. I didn’t get too much sleep this weekend, but when do I ever?
02.19.08The future is a scary thing
I don’t know, I’ve just been really tired lately. Getting school off for a week and then trying to get back into the routine tends to do that I guess. As you might’ve guessed, I haven’t done much coding today. Just chilling around, listening to Lunar, playing Phun, and half-playing Ashen Empires. To be honest, I’m afraid I might not make it on time. I can make it really close for sure, off by a couple days at most, but I’m not completely sure if it can go gold on the date I mentioned before.
I’ve been thinking a lot, though. Not just about the internal mechanics of things, like I usually do, but more so of the future. Will EXRP flourish once again? How will people like my new script–I’ve put a lot of time and effort into it, I surely wouldn’t want to disappoint. What about the GMod RP community–is it down the tubes forever? Maybe I can help save it? I don’t know, it’s mostly just philosophical type stuff. When I think about myself coding and what I’ve done at such an early age, it makes me wonder about the future. Will coding just stay as a hobby, or will I make it a profession? Or will I go into a completely different field, like law or something? Will I even have a job? I should probably just keep to the time at hand, however. I think that’s what I’ll do.
My plans for EXRP are as follows. I finish the script, then take a break from GMod–or computers, for that matter–and then just play Assassin’s Creed or something all day for like a week; until everything is settled down and I’ve had time to relax more. Then I’ll come back and have fun RPing on my new script with my good ol’ friends, of course. I want EXRP-Script to make a difference with GMod RP. Right now, because of DarkRP, a lot of people new to RP think it’s all about running around and DMing. I think that’s horrible. Hopefully EXRP-Script can start a new breed of RPers–more serious, imaginative ones. I’ve provided the necessary tools to start you off, now use your imagination and… Well, roleplay! I don’t know how big a difference it’ll make–especially if we stay a ’smaller’ community and don’t grow as big is Melonbrew or Taco and Banana (although I’d hate to try to maintain a server that massive). Maybe I should make my own basic RP script like DarkRP, except one that promotes good RP, and release it on Facepunch? Maybe that’ll make things a bit better?
I don’t know. I don’t even know why I’m full of so many rhetorical philosophical questions today, either. Maybe I’m just tired. Yeah, I think I’m tired. ‘Night.
02.17.08Slowly coming together
There’s not much left to do, but of what there is, it’s slowly coming together quite nicely. All that’s left is finishing the RP menu, really. The newspaper section is half done, as is the communications section. I have yet to begin the labor section, but the home section is finished. It was just text. ;p With the stuff that’s left, it’s just a matter of hooking stuff up to the MySQL properly. It’s pretty easy, but it’s pretty damn boring. The buy menu still has to be done, but I’ve already gotten that spawnmenu-type layout made for the new character screen, so I can just take it from there, albeit a few adaptations. As for the SENTs and SWEPs, I can just port them from EXLRP, for the most part. Roggy still has some SWEPs on their way, which helps me a lot. It’d take me forever to try and configure them properly and realistically–though I’ve already made the SWEP base.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it. I’ve been kinda tired today from all that work yesterday, so I’ve just been kinda sulking around all day. I found a rather new music artist called Lunar, who plays instrumental ambient drum ‘n’ bass songs. Boy, that was a mouthful. He’s pretty good, though. His songs have the kinda cinematic industrial/techy feeling you’d usually hear in scenes with hackers in movies, like Riley in National Treasure. I’m sure you’ve seen that movie and heard it’s soundtrack–it’s quite nice. So, enough of my banter; you’d better take a listen to Lunar for yourself. Both of his albums are available for a free download at his site, though the latest one may not be available for said free download for too much longer.
As for the many renovations going on here at dvondrake.com, I think I’m about done. I’ve gotten a buncha neat plugins for Wordpress, and I’m really starting to like it. It’s a lot faster, too, since it has a caching plugin. Neat-o.
Enough of the geek slang, though, I’m tired. Or maybe I’m just hungry… I don’t know, lets just say I’m both tired and hungry. Ah, there we go, a solution that fits everyone’s demands. Now perhaps I can eat… Or sleep, fine. Or both. At the same time. Yes, that takes the cake. What the hell am I rambling on about, again?
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