devblog / friday 200821 (Patreon)

Hi there. Welcome to yet another Friday that is steadily sinking into the quicksand of history to join all the previous ones. By tomorrow it will have slipped from our grasp forever. There will never be another 200821. Hope you're enjoying it while it lasts...

[UPDATE: It has been pointed out to us that we didn't mention the V2 stream drop-out that happened earlier in the week. The stream itself never stopped, but it did go down briefly because of a YouTube glitch... V2 is currently up and running here: https://youtu.be/fC9cP4beLOM... While this test stream remains unlisted we can't make a permanent link for it, and so if there's ever a blip like this, when we restart the YouTube hookup it gives us a new one. We updated the link on last week's devblog, but perhaps we could have made that clearer to the rest of you. So apologies if you've been missing it - please update your bookmarks! - 65LABS Online Continuity Team]

THIS WEEK

- The time-stretched VGM (vague general meeting) that has been happening on and off at 65LABS for a couple of weeks now is starting to calm the wild, untamed waters of the Wreckage Systems masterplan. The rest of 2021 is now clearer to us, and sets us up nicely for heading into the great unknown of 2022. More details to come but expect the continuation and eventual conclusion of the Wreckage Systems Technical Overview, ancillary tangents into various topics including field recording in Japan, The Midi Thief, unlikely recording techniques and old replicr, 2019 patches, amongst other things. Also there are some plans afoot for the V1 archive that we think you’re gonna like, and there will likely be the occasional ‘half-release’ of miscellaneous extra audio that doesn’t quite qualify as a full release, but we think you might be interested in anyway.

- Other than that, this week was mostly spent on some relatively dull updates for the stream. These include:

• System Repetition… The weighted probabilities is a good way of cycling through systems, but wasn’t doing enough to avoid the same system repeating too often. Previously we had implemented a minimum time, so a system couldn’t relaunch before at least ten minutes had passed. This didn’t solve the problem to our ears, and so now a system will not relaunch until at least ten other systems have played. This should hopefully allow for longer stretches of listening without hearing the same kinds of things. Let’s see how it goes.
•  Remote Control. This next week we will be testing out changing the probability weightings of systems remotely, without needing to stop the stream. We can also skip systems and cue up specific systems without stopping the stream. This is more of a backend debugging kind of feature and is, perhaps, not particularly interesting, but it had to be done sometime. So it was done this week.
• We think we have fixed the Discord bug, which means we can have a channel there posting the currently playing systems again. (This is just running on a secret test discord server at the moment because it doesn’t make sense to switch it to the real one while the rest of the public streams are still on V1). Additionally there is a long term (currently deliberately garbled) .txt log, for all your data visualisation needs. (And to help with bug tracking). (7H3 r341 1337 H4CK3r5 4M0N657 Y0U M16H7 83 4813 70 Cr4CK 7H3 Ur1 C0D3 70 F1ND 7H3 N0N64r813D V3r510N)

All these fixes/updates are in build 2.0.0.4 which, at the time of writing, had just gone live to the server, but there might be some major bugs (i.e - systems are running silently). Since this is, after all, a test stream and we are the only ones who appear to be watching at the moment anyway, we're gonna let it run for a while to try figure out what's going wrong. But we might have to revert back to 2.0.0.3 and/or stop the test stream. If we end up doing the latter, then apologies and we'll make up for it next week one way or another.

[PRE-PUBLISHING EDIT: The reason for the silences has been found and is currently being fixed for new build 2.0.0.4b, which should hopefully be online before this post goes live or shortly after. The silences were actually present last week too, and it turns out that these gaps were where the new systems should have been playing. This means that you have not yet heard Cycle Three, Paralt Original, Threadless or Circuit Magnetic, all of which were supposed to have been introduced last week! They are working in the stream as of 2.0.04b] 

- MIXING FOR RELEASE #4 HAS STARTED! It is finally coming together and it is sounding good so far. Out of all the Wreckage Systems releases so far, this one is definitely the most stream-like so far in its structure. But make no mistake, the humans were very much in charge when building it.

NEXT WEEK

- Next week we will definitely, finally try to address the AUTOCODE bug and, depending on how much time that takes and how successful it is, focus the rest of the time on adding as many new systems to the stream for the next build as we can.