Shannon's Journal Discussion Thread, Vol. 8

[Shannon]

Unfortunately, the time I had slotted for changing over to DRS was thrown in the trash because I was sick.  Now I don't have that time to do it before releasing E6.

Hi Shannon,

I'm sure I speak for many here when I say - please take your time and add everything that can improve E6 into E6 (including DRS).

I personally plan to get E6 and I've no problem waiting a few weeks.

Also, E6 is a fundamental sub that will probably be incorporated into future products (I'm sure any future version of UMS, AM, LTU will incorporate some focused version of E6 - tailored to the goals of the sub of course). Meaning any improvement you make to E6 will be carried forward into multiple subs.

Here's the situation.

The replacement of the shield will require about 2 weeks of work.  That two and a half weeks I was sick?  That's when I was planning to do that.

I cannot take however long it takes because at this point we are down to publishing just one title per month, and that's the bare minimum I need to keep the ship afloat.  That means I have to get this title out by the end of this month, and it's not a choice.  

Furthermore, the configuration coming out of the models is so ridiculous that it took me 4 days just to tag the key script proper.  It's so big that I may have to invent a new build technique to handle this script, which will likely be over 500 pages long, skeleton and key script.  

That much audio takes a lot longer to throw around in the building of a subliminal, also.  So it's right now a race to the finish line, with me working myself ragged every day to accomplish this.

On top of that, there is the question of which shield is better for this sub.  You all like DRS, and I understand why; but for some subs, DRS is not the better choice, and this one is likely one of them.  Why?  DRS takes significantly more energy, and certain personality types actually respond by doubling down on their attacks in response to it.  The more you encounter that response, the more energy it takes to maintain and enact the DRS.  But with an impact rating like this, I'm pretty sure you're going to want all the energy you can get just to run the sub for it's primary purposes.  GS also doesn't draw escalation responses from that type of personality.

Finally, the way 5.11G subs are built, the key script proper is what makes the sub achieve it's primary goals, and the skeleton script is what enables the key script proper to do so.  This modularity means that the key script does not incorporate a shield.  Currently, the shield is built into the skeleton script, and that is why it's such a bear to change it over; I didn't think we would need to change the shield again before 6G, so it didn't matter how difficult that would be when I set this up.  The goal of this approach was to save me three days of work every time I build a program by giving me static build files for the skeleton script.  I see that I am not only going to have to re-build the static build files, but modularize the shield as well; that will allow me to build with no shield, or DRS, or GS or whatever other shield I want.  But getting that modularization and static file rebuild done will take me probably 2 weeks to do.  That's time I cannot be working on 6G or directly building a title.

If there is any time left before the end of the month, and I can find a way to change the shield without doing 2 weeks of work, I'm glad to do it.  But on both of those counts, it seems unlikely at best.