devblog / friday 280521 (Patreon)

This is the tenth weekly development blog from 65LABS. Ten weeks of W R E CK A G E. How has it been for you?

It seems like the current numbers at 65LABS have settled around the mid 500s for now. We're still some way off our attempted hostile takeover of YouTube, but that’s still a really solid number of people for which we are hugely grateful. Being given the time to build and explore out in these lesser-visited regions of noise space is a massive privilege. Thanks for sticking with us.

Here’s what has been happening…

THIS WEEK

• 65HQ has become temporarily out-of-bounds for covid-related reasons. We are all fine, but this unsurprisingly limits some things that we want to be doing. Like everyone else, we’ve had more than a year now of figuring out how to work remotely, and so the more computer-based Wreckage Systems development has been continuing apace. But there’s only so much we can do in the way of actual music making without having that space to record in. Release #3 is shaping up nicely, but we will almost certainly need to get back into 65HQ before it can be made properly ready to pass on to Dave ‘Golden Trainers’ Sanderson for mixing.

• At approximately 10am on 26th May, the Wreckage Systems live stream briefly achieved sentience. It is hard to explain how or why but, the best we can tell, for some reason it started stacking all the systems on top of one another to create a kind of hyper-noise. It lasted about an hour before imploding. If you weren’t one of the lucky ones who caught this happening in realtime, don’t worry: our digital archaeologists have managed to extract the whole thing. To add to the already sublime sound the systems manifested, we ran the audio through our best analog distortion circuitry, mastered it, and will be making it available soon. It isn’t going to be to everybody’s taste. This isn’t just a wall of noise, it’s a whole city of noise. But if that’s your thing, you’re in for a treat. (This will be free to patrons, obvs).

• LOTS of development on version two. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you’re not interested in the technical details but: we have DITCHED the previous framework wherein systems were built either using FMOD, the in-built Unity audio, or a package called Audio Helm. Instead, we took a deep breath and have gone all in on using Wwise to manage all the sounds. This is a big step, and required us rebuilding all systems from the ground up. To make things even more complicated, although the feature set of Wwise offers much more potential overall, it doesn’t match the previous features we were relying on one-for-one. So when V2 does eventually arrive, the systems you already know won’t sound quite the same. As V2 is becoming such a departure (including the beginnings of a visual refresh for the YouTube stream), it makes us wonder if we should also put some thought into ‘archiving’ V1 in some way. Or do we embrace the ephemeral churn of internet content and let it drift off into the digital ether? Thoughts appreciated!

• There was a patron post yesterday featuring an old generative music experiment that we put together for a one-off No Man’s Sky live performance. It features a video of a ‘song’ that exists nowhere else. You can have a read HERE if you missed it.

NEXT WEEK

• ’Plans next week will be somewhat subject to covid’ - literally everybody. That's 2021...

• Whatever else happens, we’ll get plenty of development done on V2. Specific plans include: getting a test stream with one/two systems up and running. (If feasible, we'll try to share this with you somehow, but don't get your hopes up.) We'll be getting most of the rest of the systems upgraded. There’s also a couple of new V2 concepts being thrown around the '#code-things' channel at 65’s super-private inner communications server. (Slack). One is called ‘The Mist’, the other is called ‘The Hubris’. We’ll let you make of that what you will.

• The eternally-promised tech-heavy blog post remains in the works because it is hard to gauge how interesting it will be to a wider audience and, more importantly, feels kind of out of date at this point as we forge ahead with V2. So maybe, if a good time presents itself, we might try to do an informal Q&A in the Discord back-channel at some point in the week, that could focus on the super-tech stuff most people aren’t bothered about. Let us know in the comments if that is of interest to anybody here.

That’s your lot. Enjoy your weekend.