Hard Light Productions Forums
Archived Boards => The Archive => Machina Terra => Topic started by: Dragon on August 01, 2011, 06:56:26 pm
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(http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m65/Glonianar/cutscene01afull01_0002017.jpg)
After discussion on internal forum, we have decided that time has come to take this step.
Despite the brief burst of activity, during which the team tried to salvage the project, we failed to do that.
Some work was done, but not enough, and the team slowly ceased activity. Aside from an April fools joke, nothing happened out there.
I'm sorry for everybody who waited for a release, though after all this time, I wouldn't be suprised if not many such people left out there.
I thereby, of behalf of all active team members, declare Machina Terra project officially dead. Machine will not awake, not anytime soon.
All our work can be downloaded here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?7oq29i1e7k86rq1
These are all contents of our SVN, and unfinished cutscenes made by Styxx.
I hope somebody will, in the future, revive the project, like it happened with 158th, and that this will turn out better than 158th.
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Well that's a real shame. Oh well.
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I like the Charon and Chimera, still looking through the models.
I hope some of these find a use later on.
Redunantly, the Crash.pof, crashes PCS. :lol:
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It's actually a terrain model (you can see it in modelview), one I'd like to see fixed, because I have an use for it.
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Bah. You people and your bloody modeldumps. No consideration for us hard-working wiki contributors who have to come along after you, and put all these new ships on the wiki! Just keep 'em to yourself next time, OK? :doubt:
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machina terra is gone?... a bump.
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Well crud. :( I really hope someone decides to pick things up....just from the released files, there's already so much work put into it.
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Lots of sad and angry people in this thread. :(
(http://www.sanitaryum.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/cat_love.gif)
But, thanks for releasing the assets. I'm going through them (slowly).
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it is a sad day yet there is still hope
sad to see one of the old mods die entirely
but at least its not taking everything with it
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First of all, I'm not blaming anyone, because real life comes first.
I'd like to quote Dragon from the internal forums:
I'm just letting you know that the SVN certification expired.
Now, I'm writing in a thread which is on top of the list and get necro warning. It's also the first post this year.
Seriously, this is not how it was supposed to look like. I joined hoping that there will be something to do, effects to work on, textures, etc.
It turned out the awakening of MT did not last long. I support the idea of releasing a modeldump, since from what I see, MT is just dead. Nobody even noticed the project is looking for help. Over half a year and the only thing happening is an april fools joke in a public board.
The only people replying to this were me, Raven2001 & Gloriano. We are just the working force, so there's no project lead to be found anywhere. And without a project lead, a project of this size is simply impossible. It's sad, but I think the decision to stop this and release everything we have done so far was the right choice. Maybe someone will use one of the models for his mod, or get some inspiration while playing one of the almost finished missions.
Don't really know the status of the campaign, but MT15-MT19 should be in a kinda playable state. Yeah, this is some advertisement for the missions done by me, but I don't want all my work to be completely in vain.
Oh, and a special "We're sorry" for CSA-DarthVader, our beloved forum stalker. While most people left, you always were by our side. :)
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Some of the missions could indeed be in nearly-ready-for-beta state, but unfortunately, there still would be a lot to be done.
BTW, could somebody highlight it? Maybe that'd keep at least the modeldump from being completely forgotten.
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Already send karajorma a PM about this.
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Done'd.
Sad to see this go.. this mod was the one that inspired me to get into modding many MANY years ago...
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This was actually a long time coming, unfortunately. Sorry CSA-DarthVader :(
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I really hope that people will use the assests since i think some of them are rally nice like TFD Demogorge my favorite suicide ship. I think we should do some kind of 'credit file/post' so that everyone who worked on missions/modeels/textures and everything else get's credit.
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It's a shame to hear Machina Terra turned out to be dead, that sucks. However, I'm also very happy that you've uploaded all these assets, as many people can make use of more high quality assets to play and fred with. I also hope I can make good use of them.
I hope your talents will be put to good use in another FS2 project in the future.
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You clearly haven't downloaded them yet. :)
These are all retail quality, though designs themselves are great.
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I care more about the designs personally, as with shaders and correct lighting, even retail stuff looks a lot better. Besides, I can put more of them on the screen this way..
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It's sad the project died - now browsing through that dump I can see that it'd made a promissing play...
I feel like a scavanger but I think I've a new home for the Chimera, the Garogyle and the Gryphon (although I'll have to make a few changes)
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yeah... forum stalker... shoot i have been on here almost religiously for the past 8-9 years? i joined because of this project... i didnt help out with it because id more than likely eff it up big time, I understand RL and i am really sad to see this go, but life goes on, Thanks for the dump, even though its probably hard to not see the fruits of your labor in a campaign, these models and everything else will help someone out there. God bless you all, R.I.P. Machina Terra
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These models need to be resmoothed.
**** you, True****. **** you.
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I did a reskin of the Raptor because I thought it looked like plastic. I guess if anyone wants it I can upload it somewhere.
But yeah, the mesh needs to be resmoothed. >_>
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The great grand-daddy of them all..... Bad times :C
I'll never.forget the TFXD Apocalypse..... The ABSOLUTE VERY.FIRST.MOD I ever used on FS2, used by my squad in its fan.fiction as our base ship. And incidentally, the ship that led me to.go scouting.for more mods, eventually leading me.here.
Gawd bless you MT, it's all your fault :3 xxx
:( :sigh:
:warp:
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Wow, this is really sad. I was always inspired by the MT trailer. Sorry guys.
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Sorry to hear about this; though I haven't known about it for that long, the stuff on the website was really interesting. :(
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The irony being I have been working on it and CoW in private. Oh well.
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I don't think that you alone would be able to keep the project up. Although Spoon made WoD by himself, he had just one project to work on. MT is too big for such a small team. You can, of course, keep working on it, assets no longer being exclusive shouldn't be much of a problem (afterall, CoW uses only public assets). Projects have been releasing their assets anyway.
Even with the storyline and mission drafts out, nothing is stopping us from picking the project up again, as SVN and internal board are still there (though SVN certification could use updating).
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The irony being I have been working on it and CoW in private. Oh well.
well you could have informed us!!!!!! and hey btw
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The machine lays to rest, waiting for the right moment to strike.
I sure hope some guys will pick this up later, kept me interested for years this mod.
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So what was the plot?
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There are drafts included in the pack.
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So what was the plot?
Basically it starts with finding a damaged Herc 2 in Polaris, and while escorting the pilot back to GTD Alexxia they get attacked by a Phoenix Fallen Cult(they are actually GTVI Agents trying to recover the pilot since he is modified human and is important part GTVI Etak project (an component) hiding the fact that they have blockade that is keeping shivans from entering Polaris until it's broken and they have impact why at first TA is hostile at GTVA one of the GTVI destroyers fires and destroys a TF vessel
I have the full design doc that i could post if anyone is interested.
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I AM INTERESTED.... :shaking:
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such a pity! However, perhaps it could be one day reborn again in some form... perhaps once certain projects have been completed! it's scenario has always been considered top notch and it would be a shame to let it die like that!
Possibly at this stage, the only thing IMo that might be premature to release would be the script...
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also given the fact that other projects like mindgames are hibernating in that exact same way, and that some people have stated to continue to work on MT, surely there's hope for it yet?
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There is always hope... Never give up... never surrender.. unless its 3 times your size... then throw in the towel
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So you're not going to post the plot?
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You can take a look at story docs I included in the pack.
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Perhaps it might be interesting to limit the release of plot elements at that point as some people have expressed interest in working on it again. it "could" come back online...
just saying...
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Believe me, the level of activity on internal convinced me that it was a good thing to do. And I'm not going to mess with the file of that size when it's already up.
Also, there are missions, very incomplete, but you could extract a fair bit of story from them.
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how many missions are done? how many were planned?
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There are 30 mission for the main campaign included into the release, I don't know how many are functional.
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it's quite advanced! it could be a little premature to call it dead just yet especially given the fact that members like shadowolf still stated working on this when the announcement came!
After all, many projects more than once have slowed enough to be considered dead! I'm just worried that by releasing everything you might nullify any interest at finishing this! On the other hand, that's only my opinion and as such it doesn't matter much.
Should some project advance enough like CoW or even war in heaven, perhaps steam will return to the old MT...
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You haven't seen the internal. No posts for nearly a year. No motivation. As I said, this was the whole team's (or what's left of it) decision.
Perhaps after COW, Shadowwolf would try to rally MT team and recruit new people again. We should see, 158th also dumped it's assets, then got reviewed (as disastrous as it was, but this was their team's fault).
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precisely my point!
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CoW is far away though, and MT team was mostly unreachable when I released the dump. I think that it was better than keeping these assets locked down. MT resurrection is a big "maybe" and we don't know if or when anybody proposes this.
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who was active in the team so far?
I recall also BWO going through a similar phase...
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Me and Gloriano, for certain values of "active" (one such value being "posting and being reachable via forum).
Dark Shadow posted once, after I declared my intents to release a dump.
That's it. None of us is a Spoon, so we decided that the project is dead. Honestly, the SVN thread (in which the final discussion took place) gets downright depressing at the end.
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Heartbroken I am. This was the first big MOD I remember seeing on these boards and getting excited about way back when Volition Watch was still active. And still the best trailer for any Freespace project I've yet seen.
(Though Adaggio for Strings probably helped. A little.)
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Well, BWO did survive several periods of inactivity and staff changes, with luck, MT will also!
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All the material's been released now, so there's certainly nothing to stop someone from coming in and finishing things up. :)
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especially as from what I recall over 50% of the campaign is fredded...
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Starlord.. since you are so optimistic about this, perhaps you should do it?
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especially as from what I recall over 50% of the campaign is fredded...
Since I did include the missions, you could check them out for yourself.
If you can debug the modpack, finish the missions and wrap them up, I'm certain that people will appreciate that.
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I certainly wish I had the skills, but I'll change that once I'm finished with that medical school degree.
I'm certainly tired of not being able to do a thing to change the status of those projects aside from finding modelers here and there for custom shippacks.
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especially as from what I recall over 50% of the campaign is fredded...
All the missions are on some phase actually just not finished and are missing all the effects that were planned( blackholes and stuff like that
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I certainly wish I had the skills, but I'll change that once I'm finished with that medical school degree.
Personally I'm trying to get as much done before med school finishes, as I imagine free time will become even more scarce once one starts working.
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I'm afraid in france they are quite bottlenecking when it comes to the habeas corpus of the competitive exam. I sadly do have my current share of problems requiring my attention regarding that! However, that doesn't mean the rest will be that way (some even say paradoxically that the national exam (5th year) is actually simpler than the competitive test i'm setting for)...
However, I certainly have plans for FS!
Blackholes? How were you counting on pulling this one off? Is it doable?
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Y'know...I think I'm going to take a closer look at this pack too. Who knows, maybe I can finally attempt to contribute something concrete around here.
Edit: So if I'm reading all of this right, the Word documents included in the dump are for a demo campaign, which seems like it was just barely started. There's an in-depth document for one of the missions, but was there ever anything prepared for the rest? And is there any documentation for the main campaign proper? There's no included campaign file, and I can see what looks like a couple of loop missions, so I'm not really sure how everything fits together just from a brief glance.
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Mongoose, should you wish, you might want to talk to shadowwolf about it! He was also working on machina and expressed the will to delve further into the pack!
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missions, but was there ever anything prepared for the rest? And is there any documentation for the main campaign proper?
There are 2 documents for campaign 1 is the Master one that has every detail plot details, cutscene stuff for the 7 that were planned and stuff like that.. and another is has more detailed on missions what supposed to be there etc.
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mongoose if you want to discuss things on this nature feel free to pm me. it may take me afew days to get back with you, between work and school my time is very limitted right now. but I will get back with you.
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I think I'll do that. :)
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It's a shame that it was never finished, but it's good that you guys decided to release the files. I can't even count how many hours of work I've put into this, from models to textures to missions to weapon animations (if it wasn't lost or changed, mission 4 is by yours truly, and it was one hell of a confusing mess but I loved playing it). We've also had some of the greatest people from the modding community putting effort into this, all the way back to Dark, who created the Charon and designed the textures for the Terran Forces ships way back in 2001, I think. Anyone remember him?
There was a time, back when the VBB was still active, when MT was the project to go for groundbreaking stuff in FS2. It all became commonplace, and the project's ambition ended up becoming its downfall. But it was a good effort, and I hope everyone enjoyed working on it, and whoever downloads the released content enjoys it as well.
Edit: Also, check the cutscenes! I loved working on them. I'll see if I still have some unreleased ones at home and post them.
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MT was one of the early, now-dead projects that inspired me to get into FreeSpace modding.
I definitely remember Dark. I recently learned that he worked on a FreeSpace campaign with a man (Chris L'Etoile) who ended up designing the Mass Effect setting for BioWare and writing the in-game codex.
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Sweet, the old guard. Good to see you Styxx. :)
Just looking back up this thread, I'd almost forgotten about getting in touch with ShadowWolf to see what could be done with the unfinished material. Note to self: get on that again.
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For those who don't want to bother downloading the whole pack to check the cutscenes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca4GOPAaSpY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiyGtHwo_IU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8qnRBMSFDI
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that's not helping, sir! Now my curiosity is even more piqued!
Speaking of which, might anyone say more regarding the warhammer destroyer?
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that's not helping, sir! How my curiosity is even more piqued!
Speaking of which, might anyone say more regarding the warhammer destroyer?
What do you want to know? I assume you saw the pictures:
(http://mt.hard-light.net/devel/images/warhammerw-04.jpg)
(http://mt.hard-light.net/devel/images/warhammerw-05.jpg)
I don't think it was ever textured... The original version was simpler and used the Hecate textures.
There was a lot more work done on the cutscenes, but none in "done" status as those... Including some work on the one I tought would be the most awesome moment in the campaign, showing the Shivans jumping from their own ships to board the Apocalypse. Never could get their motion quite right, though, and the surface of the Apocalypse always looked wonky; even with all the details from the texture actually modeled and with a ton of added small-scale detail, it was too bland a landscape. Of course, that was early on, and I never really got back to it - if I had put in the effort on that one that I put on the Demogorge main hall scene it would have ended up much better.
I got to remember to check for this when I'm at home to see if there's anything else worth posting.
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I personnally see a lot of awesome in there, and who knows, they may be reused by shadowwolf or moongoose should they stir MT back up!
as far as the warhammer goes, it strikes me as small for a destroyer...
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I personnally see a lot of awesome in there, and who knows, they may be reused by shadowwolf or moongoose should they stir MT back up!
as far as the warhammer goes, it strikes me as small for a destroyer...
It is smaller; between a corvette and a destroyer. There should be an explanation for it on the tech room description, I think, but somehow it got switched by "A big ship, yes." :p
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I like the cutscenes... I would also like to know how difficult it is to make something like that.
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I like the cutscenes... I would also like to know how difficult it is to make something like that.
Very! You'll need to pick up 3D modeling as a start.
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I've already been trying to make ships in Blender... I assume cutscenes are more difficult.
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Rendering is a different but related skillset - not necessarily any more or less difficult, but difficult in a different way.
That said, if you don't know how to model, you're going to have a harder time rendering, because you will inevitably come up against situations where the assets you want to render (often more complex than just ships) aren't available to you, and have to be made from scratch.
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Man, the whole weekend went by and I didn't find the time to upload the other stuff I wanted to. Crap.
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Rendering is a different but related skillset - not necessarily any more or less difficult, but difficult in a different way.
That said, if you don't know how to model, you're going to have a harder time rendering, because you will inevitably come up against situations where the assets you want to render (often more complex than just ships) aren't available to you, and have to be made from scratch.
How hard is it to make one of those green swirly subspace vortex things?
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Rendering is a different but related skillset - not necessarily any more or less difficult, but difficult in a different way.
That said, if you don't know how to model, you're going to have a harder time rendering, because you will inevitably come up against situations where the assets you want to render (often more complex than just ships) aren't available to you, and have to be made from scratch.
How hard is it to make one of those green swirly subspace vortex things?
how hard is it for you to try? :p
do note, i am very much serious here. its as hard as you are willing to do it.
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Well I really would not know where to start when it comes to an effect like that
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Well I really would not know where to start when it comes to an effect like that
google helps. "creating special effects with blender" comes to mind as a googleable subject. if all you are going to do is ask how hard something is and not actually try to do it, you will always fail.
dont be so lazy. when there's a will, there's a way.
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When did I say I would never try? I could just use like a tutorial or something.
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That's a ****load of animated MAX shockwave objects packed closely together with a procedural texture and a post-process glow on top.
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I wish to include Charon video in my campaign,can i?
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you should be able to use it, just remember to mention the creator of the animation in credits and the creator is Styxx
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Thanks,i will mention Styxx in the credits.Since i want to use installation itself too,so who created that?
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Dark was the creator of Charon station