devblog / friday 130821 (Patreon)

Here we go. Wreckage System devblog weekly update number... twenty? 144daysofwreckage and counting on the main stream. And the test stream has also been up and running for ~38 days now. STATS.

How’s it going? Summer 2021 rushes by/drags on/provides a fragile respite/leaves no place to hide/is unknowable/is the same as it ever was. It's like trying to catch your breath as you get dragged into future faster than the air can enter your lungs. History is swarming.

It’s… a lot, isn’t it.

Only stubborn utopian stylez allowed here in the devblog though, so instead of looking away from the screen at that world on fire, let’s instead celebrate the victory of getting through another week unscathed, of accruing another 7 days of noise and memories, and bask in the solace to be found in realising that you’ll never, ever have to be Jeff Bezos.

THIS WEEK

- V2.0.0.3 was quietly cyber-injected onto the test stream last night. It is live now; go look. A storm of binary and bandwidth. 4.44GB of ice cold computer punk. Like the 90s before the 90s were cool again. But cool. And it brought with it four new systems of Wreckage…

- New System #1: Cycle Three. As mentioned here last week. Pretty skronky. This system uses a new kind of loop-based technique with the emphasis being on realtime fx parameters controlled by various coded logic. Full skronk. Keep an ear out for it.

- New System #2: Paralt-Original. This is currently using the same technique as Cycle Three, and it will give you an idea of how far that much-loved system Paralt-Piano strayed from the source material. We threw this system into the build as it sounds pretty cool as is, but it has been flagged in the 65LABS quality control wing as one that could benefit from some more subtlety in a subsequent update. The choppiness of this looping technique works well with the skronk of Cycle Three, but with Paralt-Original’s already-maddeningly-weird time signature, maybe it’s a little too much. See what you think.

- New System #3: A new Seed system, Circuit Magnetic. Built from guitars and contact microphone recordings that capture the beating electrical hearts of various consumer goods. Perhaps not the most melodic of systems.

- New System #4: Threadless. This one is Full Doom. Melt your brain into it, loudly.

- Aside from these, there are no other tweaks that it was safe enough to throw in given the time we had available to us. In particular, there is a recurring bug spotted by a few people now, which seems exclusively limited to the AUTOCODE systems. The reason for this is probably that we don’t actually know what we’re doing, even though we pretend quite confidently that we do. We haven’t had time to look into it too deeply yet, beyond a quick check on how the samples are getting triggered, which would have been a relatively easy fix. But it wasn’t that. This is on a list of things to get to, because it would be nice to keep those AUTOCODE systems in there and, ideally, keep making more of them.

- MIXING. The mixing for release number four got held up this week for various reasons. We are in a queue. We hope to make solid progress on this next week.

- V1 Archive. We carved out a bit of time to try out some quick and dirty ideas as a proof of concept as to how we might be able to archive the V1 Stream (remember that?). It is early days for this, but it seems tentatively possible that we might be able to do that in a more interesting way than just capturing the output of it.

NEXT WEEK

- Hopefully the mixing will be well underway.

- Tweaks to the test stream and more new systems.

Also, come on, we need two volunteers BUT ONLY TWO to fix this travesty on the test stream: 

Ok. That's it for now. Thank you for your continuing support. It really is hugely appreciated as we all wade through this weird future together.

Take care out there.