We're still slogging on HumanML. If the effort stays
close to the original expectations, it may be useful
as a means to create a character and setting database
with AI applications. But like all such efforts, the
more interests that get involved, the more it tends
to drift.
My son turned m
Nope. Working and tending other burning bushes.
Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
-Original Message-
From: Michael St. Hippolyte [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2001 11:12 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The OZ project has a similar approach to working
with potential plotlines according to a template.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/papers/bibliography.html
#oz
Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
-Orig
m: Miriam English [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 6:34 PM
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len)
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Alice is Not Enough
Hmmm... I have been thinking a lot about plots lately too.
I am unconvinced that there is any way (yet) to analyse computationa
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jcma/papers/1986-ai-memo-871/subsection3_8_1.ht
ml
Y'all might enjoy that as more food for thought. The notions of
plot molecules are interesting.
"Plot units provide a unvalidated but nevertheless interesting vocabulary
for designating affective relationships and
The notion is compressability or the Kolmogorov
complexity: the information measure is the
length of the generative program. Chase that
thread. For sure, we have a cultural or
hermeneutic interpretation, but essentially
the theme determined the overall product.
It is the experience that is
Sophistication and value: this would indicate
to me that the value of the story, subjectively,
would be in the cost to recreate the experience.
If we create a story that is not "superficial"
then we have introduced algorithms that will
make the experience highly and subjectively
unique. It
"an object can be considered superficial when it is not very difficult
to recreate another object to perform its function. For example,
a garbage pit can be created by a wide variety of random sequences of
truckfulls of garbage; it doesn't matter much in which order the trucks
come"
http://www.
Not oddly, we find that in almost all worlds,
the relationships of simplicity to beauty
holds. That which is attractive is also
subjectively simple.
http://personal.centric.net/natasha/locoface/
I am sitting here working on a paper on
ontologies and find myself repeating the
phrase, a choi
Feedback into discoverability. We have
agents for that, what I might like to call,
Golem worlds. At the point at which the
Golem is entertaining, it is effective
because it is affective. A shoot-em-up
in a maze is surprising but not astonishing.
A monster that makes you answer its questi
echnique handles the
rest. That and as Paul says, Keep Wrling.
Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
-Original Message-
From: Sandy Ressler [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 8:32 AM
To: Bullar
danti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
-Original Message-
From: Miriam English [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2001 7:01 PM
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len)
Cc: Miriam English; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: virtual storytelling conference
An excellent point Len! I had gotten mys
That is cool.
After looking at the worlds on a hotter platform
this weekend, seeing real time motion, fast good
sound, and so on, I am of the opinion that we
no longer have the platform barriers we had
three years ago to building very compelling
vrml-lit. It is just time, imagination, and
Sure. It is a common theatrical technique.
Unfortunately, emergence-based meaning
depends a lot on the skill of the perceiver
to create coherent maps. Think of the
Monty Python bits like "The Meaning of Life".
How easy is it to go through each sketch to
see what they are doing besides mak
I agree with your assessment. Thanks for this
reference. Excellent reading.
I looked at the Skotos site and
inevitably we come back to the issues
of text MUD vs 3D real time stories.
Protocol and how to parse a protocol
as always becomes the design challenge.
We have discussed this before
A clockwork is possible. Just very hard. Again, a
"speed is money; how fast can you afford" issue of
resources. If a clockwork is an ultimate goal,
set it then by degrees work to it. I am thinking
of a server world that maintains a modular set of
worlds around it. The privilege or role o
Time to inflate the shoes a bit more ...
One has to ask why there are devils
and angels in the universe, and of course
as we were taught by Milton, they are
the side effect of the war in heaven
over the creation itself.
Devils are angels with a different agenda
set by an angel with an agen
Reading an email on the big list...
Now that is something I hadn't considered but should
be headslap obvious. The operating system security
features for user authentication and access privileges
can actually be a control in a virtual reality fiction
because it depends on roles.
Kinda of a w
Brahma is absolute. All others are
over a horizon so long we see an
eternity and a universe of immortal
deities who are yet only an age of
the timeless one.
Now we just have to figure
out if the Ds & As inherit
implementations or only interfaces. :-)
Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
Ek
Manu Len would be more honorific. :-)
We should be looking at how to create and
animate agents in multiplayer worlds using
XML/XSLT tech. It is just a vocabulary
design task. X3D gives us the hard part.
The rest is a set of vocabularies for
character motivation which can be used
to set ex
I've taken the baby steps. For me, and maybe others
here, the next steps should be a lot more adventurous.
The idea is to support driving a plot forward when
in effect maintaining an illusion of free will.
I chose that metaphor to illustrate simple concepts
of having an author who does not
Close. Let's explore the illusion management
thing. Exploring a world set up with devices
is part of the answer, but it is still a bit
too static and predictable. Let's look at how
God does it (ok, inflate your shoes, Bozos!).
Let's say God does what some theologians think
and sets up th
You write it based on observable behavior
and events. You can create internal states
easily using node transitions. It is not
hard to write it; it is a matter of working
out how to present it. Don't write stories;
create environments and shaping forces on
characters.
The difficulty is in
and whoop-bang! There it is!
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)] The SGML folk have wanted one since
Chamberlain and Goldfarb published a paper showing how to do
umpteen years ago. What the web did was kill the resistance
to it in the graphics community who
SVG has a lot of support behind it beyond Adobe. I mentioned
Adobe because I found that plug in. My guess is that this will
replace VML (Vector Markup Language) in the MS catalog. On the
XML list, SVG is being trumpeted as "the real killer app" and
the app to "revolutionize the web". See
Yo!
Check out the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) plug in from
Adobe. SVG is the new graphics standard fro the W3C. The
Adobe plug in is very scriptable from the DOM and Javascript.
There are filters for things like animated fire effects in the
Adobe plugin that use fractal noise.The si
Volitional behavior in avatars not under human volition
could be the most important aspect of vr stories. These
characters can evolve, participate, and live long beyond
the creators. Given a storybook with rules such as
are provided for series authors, isn't it the same? IOW,
the differen
Trolling around the excite demo that Sandy mentioned in
the about.com posts, the AI that fool anyone anytime
seems to be a long way off. Thinking about this lately
as adjuncts to what is available in Cybertown, I had
been wondering about building self-regulating worlds
that used local con
That is right. On my first gig, I dumped the av on top
of the group. I realized that just like real gigs, I have
to go there, scout out the club, then pick my spot.
I found the stage Viewpoint, selected it, then pushed
around until I got the right view. Luckily, the cafe has
a stage with
I like the idea of ten year olds liking that song
not the singer.
See http://www.bewitched.net/samsong.htm
Amazing how fast this was picked up. Already
getting fan mail for it. No money... but nice mail.
Good suggestions, Niclas. I have been thinking a lot over the
weekend as I read the
The performance on Friday night went fairly well. The fellow on
before me was excellent (Hawk). Extremely well-produced music.
Other than having a ten year old girl from South Dakota getting
friendly (Where are the parents of these kids???), it was the same
as the usual gig. Some points:
That is precisely how most solo gigs go in reality.
Get a steady gig and watch the crowds change.
A steady gig requires a persistent place to perform so
those that like it know how to find you, when, and where.
Persistence is everything in the performing arts.
Get some surfers and then folk
And you might want to consider the aspects of standardization of
3D formats as they would apply to biometric identification systems.
(eg, scanning and producing codes representing patterns that
are invariant to rotation, scaling, and other transformations).
Wavelet compression is applied for
> -Original Message-
> From: Mik Clarke [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
> Hmmm. Sounds like you need some standardization so that various objects
> can be easily interchanged.
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)] Yes. We have had some discussions on the
l
The issue that stays with me is the same that
faces any content artist: what is the right thing to
express? When I use my sense memory to fetch
emotions from 35 years ago to create a piece, is
that current and does that matter? The web is a
very large distribution network. What we say an
Some combination of the kind of system Andy Best put up for creating
avatars with the same approach to stock sets, gesture types, and then
getting the text and sound to the screen would be ideal. IOW, components.
Community theatres usually don't build everything from scratch. The
problem has
While IrishSpace was certainly the most exciting thing I've
been involved in OnTheNet, I have to wonder if it could be
done again. We were either blessed or really dammed
lucky to pull that off. The tech was brittle, the group was
loose, the objectives were ill-defined (that was an advantag
My pleasure, Jed.
Oooh... Flapping batwings ... would make a nice
avatar for the song I'll be doing. Maybe we need a
whole covey of vrml-lit devils. Say, "you ain't
never been lit 'til you been vrml-lit". ;-)
I'll tell you the story of Horzempa's Redemption
sometime.
Len
Ekam sat.h,
ipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
> -Original Message-
> From: Miriam English [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, August 20, 1999 1:28 AM
> To: Bullard, Claude L (Len)
> Cc: Jed Hartman; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: RE: Army & entertainmen
FYI: from Red5 (carole)
Hello all!
The sign up forms mentioned below can be found in the Cybertown
Daily News right now!
Please pass this on to anyone you think would be interested.
Call For Musicians/Sci-fi Poets/Sci-fi Story Tellers to perform
They did a bit on this on NPR this morning. They are stressing
the construction of *characters* which will drive the simulation because
of their interaction, eg, the starving child that doesn't speak english,
the nosy reporter asking sensitive questions, and so on. The
entertainment side of
The nugget of that:
"``Intelligence is a tangle of motivation and learning,'' he said. ``The
only way to build intelligent systems is to put those factors in and see
what develops.''
For a long time, we focused on intelligent tutoring (all wise machine).
This focuses on intelligent learning (ad
Define the properties of the model. Then do the
XML DTDs. Objects first: format last.
Look carefully at the MS site (love 'em
or loathe 'em, they have the best browser support
for XML). There could be potentials if X3D
tag sets for 3D can use data sources (eg, use
data islands).
To d
Swim ahead of the wave if you want to be in
the curl when the power is there to let you surf.
Like anything else, infrastructure, standard formats,
ya da ya da, still need to be in place at some point,
but the engine power means that the kinds of lit
we chat about are not only possible, but i
Plots drive action. So can an environment. One way to
make Richard's approach work is to ensure the environment
interacts as well. Rain drives people into doorways where
interesting encounters happen.Guns drive people across
borders where interesting encounters happen. To have
intera
Ran across some interesting behaviors at home last night.
If one interupts a streaming audio while in progress by
using the Itinerary buttons to go to the next scene, the
audio for that scene starts while the last one continues
to run. Fun effect, but it also means that multiple streams
can
That is because as an application category, it is not very
well defined or understood. We only have a handful of
VRML samples to look at, each based on different
metaphorical models and emphasizing different parts of
the current browser/plugin framework. Still, the fact that
it is not menti
Hi Paul:
Any way that works. There are some members of the
companies here. I suspect they are keeping up. Jed
asked the same question. Let's see at the end of
the week if we are repeating ourselves. If so, it is
time to summarize.
XML as Cindy suspects, may make things wordier
not sim
uoting the "radio play with VRML
> illustrations"
> line, but I guess she forgot.) She wondered what the advantage was of
> doing such a story as VRML rather than as a pre-rendered 3D movie.
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)]
Easy. It was what we had. It was free
> -Original Message-
> From: John D. DeCuir [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
> Hi Len,
>
> I agree with you for the most part but am curious about one point:
>
> At 01:44 PM 2/12/99 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> >o XML - this part isn't hard. 3
It may or it may not. The big impact in the beginning will be a different
model for the style (eg, if they use CSS as they do in SVG). For story
telling the situation may be better. We've spent a lot of time trying to
figure out how we should do branching, interactivity, etc. here for these
BTW: per Gavin's input about SVG and long view thoughts.
Just for the heck of it, go to
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-SVG/struct.html
and see how many concepts you recognize instantly from
your work with VRML.
This may go a lot quicker than anyone thinks.
Len
Hi Alan:
You've expressed what most of the content community I know
expresses or has expressed, so you aren't alone. The only
consolation I have to offer is that if the design goes down
the NG route, some things will get better, hopefully:
o Components - not having to support the whole spe
There is something really useful that can be done by the
members of this list given the current community brouhaha.
It is said, the VRML as it is is too hard. It is said
that the Web content community has not embraced it.
Ok. This list has most of the talent that has embraced it.
o Wha
Question: is this model different from
the typical improv class situation? In these exercises,
students are put on stage perhaps in a stage set with props,
perhaps not, and the instuctors pose situations within which the
actor must improvise dialog and actions.
The model is good except fo
The other way is to isolate a character that misbehaves, somewhat
the way people do. IOW, if a character keeps moving away from the
center of action in a situation, they get fewer and fewer clues and
cannot present the text or control tokens that cause the other
characters to react. This can
You put the point on it: what is story *telling* vs story *creation* or
more mundanely, programming.
Who is being entertained, the storycraftsman or the audience? The
audience does not know the ending and tries to predict it. That is
a tension which induces suspension of disbelief. These
Life doesn't guarantee that. Why should art?
Life isn't exactly nonlinear. Every day I come to
this office, it is still beige. Someone could change
that, but that requires an act of volition by an
agent capable of committing the act. What life
can't guarantee is that by the end of the da
can hit it with a ruler. ;-)
Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Monday, June 29, 1998 12:25 PM
> To: Bull
Has anyone here tried to use an audio node in
Cosmo 2.1b? Are all wav files being opened correctly?
I get no error but no sound either.
Also, is your ISP correctly finding the DNS for Cosmo?
Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata
Hi Alan:
I don't think we are differing just emphasizing different
aspects. Certainly the presentation affects the
presentation, but a bad story presented well is
still a good telling of a bad story. Call this my
heritage of SGML where separating content
from rendering is the holy grail.
Jump cut or loadURL. Bind a new viewpoint or
get a new world. The problem is persistence of
any states set conditionally that have to be passed.
So, doable in the first case but harder in the second
case unless one uses a database.
Yet precisely the case. Pacing is maintained because
of s
Jeff writes:
I suppose as A.I. technology advances, and we are increasingly able
to
use human controlled avatars in interactive fiction, we will find
that
quality of these experiences will increase dramatically. I've been
reading
Neal Stephensons "Diamond Age" whi
> -Original Message-
> From: Chris Crawford [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)]
Glad to know you've joined us!
> >1. Is non-linearity in a story the same as interactive?
>
> I agree with you, non-linearity is not the same
Hi Bob:
Still on for tonight?
The loading and unloading problems will be severe
and drive us into the same problems as with
IrishSpace where Mars choked the goose only
when included in the sequence of the other
scenes. For some time into the future, 3D
e-lit will be characterized by parsi
Everyone wants one of those in their life. I had one. I turned the page to
find out I was married.
I'm not sure we can always smooth over "physical" transitions like
loading a new world. OTOH, we can make sure it happens when
the user is about ready for a break. When I say smooth the trans
Light, yes, but it fairly points out the problems in
Murray's book and experiments in interactive
art: too much speculation and too few working
examples that are actually compelling.
OTOH, interaction is a quality of an environment
the enables exchange of control focus. I agree with
the as
I think that is somewhat how Crawford's system works.
OTOH, if we start clean and define characters as a
class hierarchy, we could do a clean room implementation
and control characters from Java and Javascript.
Two levels of states:
1. States of characters within worlds (eg, the internal
Ack. A step back: what are the properties
of a character object?
Len
encountered.
>
> I'm still trying to convince myself that an interactive story can be
> as
> compelling as the best linear narrative, and have to admit I'm still
> teetering
> toward linear (likely because of weight of experience in linear stories).
>
> -A
devices
> available. In addition to close ups, establishing shots, flashbacks, etc.
> you have a few other ones corresponding to the navigation options
> presented
> to the audience (free roaming, select a character to follow, controlled
> exploration along specific paths, etc.)
Yes. In the research phase one goes "looking for
the human bits". This is important in gesture, clothes,
setting, slang, and so on. As you show, it doesn't
have to be much, even a raised eyebrow (Mr Spock)
works. I've often read that the best storytellers are
the keenest observers. They
Viewpoints are story devices.
The application of story devices depend on the driver of a scene
(that is, why is the scene being presented and how does it advance the
plot).
We considered a single viewpoint in IS but it made other
tradeoffs difficult. IOW, you enter the world looking at
the
NPC generation: a node traversal model using precondition/postcondition
processing where the postconditions of a
node determine the traversal target, traversal type,
and initialization of some preconditions of the
next node. Sequences have to specify
entry points and requirements for linear
Michael provides a good summary. These
paragraphs struck me. I note the similarity to the television
commercials where a number of couples in conversation are
captured in a store as the camera changes location of interest
while the people are in motion through the aisles. They
complete a s
vents to happen in
> transit, I assume you just create an "inside the car" stage, or a "grassy
> plain" stage.)
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)] Yep. That was why we had the JJ scenes
at certain points either in the cockpit or outside: transitions in
That matches the reactions I had digging into the web site.
He has the right ideas and an engine. What I wonder about
is if the perceived limitations are aspects of simple examples
and if one of the stories developed by someone is a better
example of what the engine *can*do. The mode of sin
Interesting and promising. Brilliant Dig Ent is the company that announced
the KISS CD and saw their stock shoot up. The announcement
was out of Atlanta, so maybe the music initiative is on the other
coast just two and half hours drive from here. Whoopee!
If you look deeply into Crawford's
Take a look at Chris Crawford's work
on interactive fiction. He has worked
hard to classify emotional states and
a means for creating relationships based
on these. It is impressive. A language
which drives the scene (eg, some Java
version of what Chris uses combined
with VRML externproto
I did some email with the creator of the engine after
looking it over. This is a very sophisticated approach
and it appears Chris has really thought it through and
backs it up with a lot of experience.
">Your tools came up in a discussion on the vrml-lit list
>which is working on interactiv
In case anyone missed it, a company in Atlanta had
its stock value jump 49% based on the announcement
last week of a project with the group KISS. The project is to
produce an interactive story with music for CD. The
story and the music change based on the interaction
of the user.
Len Bull
I guess what I don't see in that list is
emotion. Say you have the characters
and the situation. At that point, the
emotions of the characters should begin
to drive actions and reactions. The story
will spawn naturally. You may have some
meta-theme (moral, what have you) that you
want
The creative process section is interesting. Like the other I/F pages,
it seems the task is to create relationships among characters by
setting traits and creating a "web of verbs" and "verb consequences".
Is the environment an active agent capable of acting and reacting?
Can't do a decent
It helps me to have some of the story, at least the
beginning, and the main character(s) in mind. Once
I get to know them, they start to live in my head
and tell me the story. When I was an actor, we
were encouraged to write down the history of the
character prior to the beginning of the p
So always do the opposite.
Film is the art of subtle acting. Theatre is usually the art of
exaggeration.
How much should a VRML character *exaggerate* a feature?
Len
Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
> -Original Message-
> From: Jed Hartman [SMTP:[
TECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 1998 1:25 PM
> To: Bullard, Claude L (Len)
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: RE: nonlinear storyboarding
>
> No problem. If you get some time you should play with some of those
> tools.
> It's remarkably easy to set up y
Excellent resource, John! As I say, not being a game player,
there are definitely nuances of this that I miss and this site
fills in a lot of that particularly the bits about puzzles. I've
seen these in my kid KA games, but not given them the
necessary amount of thought. Many thanks. Yes,
Very astute and important. The hub (eg, VRML)
sometimes is not the important factor.
Sometimes the development in the rim languages
(eg, audio, avis, gifs) is just as important or
more because they add sizzle. This is a problem
for online works and why we went to the harddisk
with IrishS
BTW, the idea of using precondition/postcondition
processing comes from the world of Interactive
Electronic Technical Manuals (MIL-STD-87269)
which adopted techniques used for diagnostic
tests for fault isolation. We considered using
this in IrishSpace but decided that on a 3 month
schedule
This is true but starting back with von Neumann,
name any situation involving communication
that is not a game. One might ask what are
the critical aspects of "gameness"
1. Scoring
2. Winning or losing
It is possible to build stories and non-linear
systems that are not games and they will
> -Original Message-
> From: Jed Hartman [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)]
It makes it sustainable. By doing this you have the
equivalent of a dungeon master that can set situations
up and you can make the online wo
Yes. For a text version of this sort of interaction in bots,
check out http://www.neurostudios.com/
A chart is a good idea. How about using an interface
for common behaviors so authors can change behaviors
from time to time?
If you want another dimension of
depth, some character/roles sh
> -Original Message-
> From: Kahuna [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
> That is correct, but my arguement is that it is a waste of the z
> coordinate to limit
> yourself to a non linear story.
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)]
Yes. It is essential to ask
Separate the techniques based on the language from
the general concepts of non-linear storytelling and
interactivity. VRML has the tools for doing both
linear and non-linear work. The major impediment
is the media (eg, the Net or CD-ROM) for loading
the rim media types (sound, avis, etc.).
By the way, if the model exhibits an emergent
unpredictable behavior, there is usually a hidden
coupling between some set of states in the
system. Emergent behaviors can be simulated
if the states of the objects include private
conditions (protos should work nicely). Eg, when a
drunk start
You are definitely being too hard on yourself, but I admire
someone who steps up to the responsibility. I repeat what
I said before, it takes guts to attempt these complex projects
with beta/alpha technology. Consider that others are doing
the conservative bits with banner ads. Well, that'
Some additional thoughts...
A producer at this critical time of the medium
is also the one who should be growing the
community skill base. Part of the upfront
analysis is sorting strengths of the contributors, sorting
the talent, and ensuring that the goals of the
production can be met by t
Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Saturday, May 02, 1998 3:23 AM
> To: Robert W. Saint John; Bullard, Claude L (Len);
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Short stories
>
> At 07:05 PM 4/17/98 -0700, Robert W. Saint John wrote:
I sat last night with the snippet of audio that Stephen
posted and ran the MIDI behind it just for fun. Interesting.
It made me think that for any future production, the script
should be recorded at a table rehearsal (regardless of
who does the speaking) so we can plan the music better.
I
It is disappointing that the sound didn't work. It is
not surprising. That was a huge jump to take.
The announcement that Cosmo will
support RealMedia is good. Like the SpinNode, we
may not like the proprietary approach, but I frankly
despair of getting certain things done any other
way a
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