devblog / friday 300721 (Patreon)

Weeks are starting to stack up like shipping containers on a panamax ship crawling out of Shanghai Port. Much like the new systems are stacking up in the prototype V2 stream. As you’ll know if you caught up last week, the V2.0.0.2b stream that is currently online has 40 systems running (see last week's post for the titles). It’s a lot, but it’s not enough. There’s a shipment of new systems parts currently somewhere in international waters on one of our hyper ships. It has been a little delayed as our captain tried to block the Suez Canal again in an effort to bring down capitalism properly this time. Almost managed it too. We’ll crack it eventually.

THIS WEEK

- It has been a relatively quiet week at the labs. With the aforementioned shipment in limbo, time was mostly spent in the joyous mode of ‘coming up with vague new music ideas’, which is an infinitely better mode to exist in than ‘actually finishing music’. Some distinctly heavy, not-very-summer sounds emerging from 65HQ Prime, which bodes well for autumn/winter and the inner goth in all of you.

- Covid-related complications and isolations came to an end this week. At least until the inevitable next ones. Apart from anything else, this means that next week we should be able to crack on getting the next release ready for mixing.

- There was a timely contribution from the 65LABS Existential Doubt wing about one of the reasons we felt compelled to begin this Wreckage Systems experiment,  using some stretched gardening metaphors and a tidy diagram. That was called Guerrilla Rewilding and if you missed it, it can be read HERE.

NEXT WEEK

- We’ll be unloading the ship and finishing up some more new systems.

- We’ll possibly be getting those systems in a new build toward the latter part of the week. Additionally, will try to add a little more metadata to the logs for some of the quieter systems.

ANY OTHER BUSINESS

- One question that we noticed on the Discord this week, (can’t remember who asked it, apologies), was about how the scheduler works in V2 in deciding which system to play next. The scheduler is called Wreckage Control. The current rule it follows is to pick systems based on their relative weighted probabilities. This means that each system is given a figure: its 'weight'. So, for example, a system with the weight 50 is five times as likely to be picked than a system with a weight of 10, while a system with a weight of 1 will hardly ever appear. These weights are constantly getting tweaked. Wreckage Control also automatically rules out any systems that have been played in the last ten minutes from playing again. (That ten minute figure might need increasing - what do you think? Are you hearing the same things too close together too often?)

- Once a system is triggered, although Wreckage Control hosts a default set of timings that a system can use if it wants to, it is the system itself that decides how long it is going to run for and in what way. It only calls back to Wreckage Control when it feels itself slipping away into the static, so Wreckage Control can start the process of picking a new one and locating its transmission.

That’s it. Let’s reconvene next week with another shipping container’s worth of memories.