Abzû on PC (5/10)

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Hey, it’s a walking simulator with a twist… swimming! I’ll give it this, Abzû is a very nice looking and great sounding game. The score is magnificent. You know the soundtrack has to be good when seemingly half of the game credits are taken up with the names of the various instrumentalists. Unfortunately, like all of these “art” games, there isn’t much in terms of a game here. You just swim around, (literally) look at fish, and occasionally click on a hot-spot. I’d be more forgiving if there was a good story to follow but, “evil thing making the ocean all evil and the only way to stop it is to swim to the end of a tunnel” is not a good story.

The Silent Age on PC (6/10)

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The biggest puzzle in this modestly sized point-and-click adventure is figuring out how to get it to even run. I bought it for 99¢ in a Steam sale a year or two ago and when I finally got around to playing it, I discovered that it would crash immediately after launching. Well, let me spoil this first puzzle for you: the game won’t run if you have Citrix Receiver installed on your computer (same for any game based on the Unity Engine). There is a fix that involves reinstalling Citrix with some command line flags. Goggle it.

Anyhow, once the game is up and running you will see its flat, vector art style with simple animations and colorful palette. This is mostly a story driven adventure in which I found the puzzles not to be very challenging. Basically, if you find an object, you know it is going to be used to unlock some other object. The only place where things get a little tricky is when time travel comes in to play. A handful of puzzles involve setting up things in the past and finding your results in the future. These are rare. Mostly time travel is only a means of navigating to hidden exits.

That said, for the money, it provides enough story and things to explore to keep it interesting and doesn’t overstay its welcome. I say that a lot, don’t I?

The Witcher TV Series

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Just finished watching The Witcher on Netflix. I’m probably biased from playing the games, but I thought it was quite good. The lead’s voice takes some time to get used to. Seems like he is just doing an impression of the game’s growly voice actor (complete with the hmms and nose breathing). The series takes about four episodes to start clicking. It’s then that you realize that the story is not being told in chronological order and you start to see how the characters relate. My main quibble is that it jumps into the magic stuff a bit too quickly before laying out ground rules. Going full “epic” so fast is overwhelming. It’s when the show focuses on its characters that it becomes fun. Like an old episode of Hercules or Xena. That is all.

Prey: The Drovers, Book 1 by John D. Brown (7/10)

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Looks like I am ending the year on a YA fiction kick. Prey is the story of a young boy (aren’t they all) who takes a job as a cattle herder for a mysterious wizardish guy. Yes, it’s mostly a thrilling tale of cattle herding. There are hints of magic and all that fantasy stuff but this is mostly about a kid who wants to show that he can do this job like a man, a manny, man man. You know what, it’s rather entertaining for what it is.

Doom [2016] on PC (9/10)

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I think this is a reboot. Was there actually a plot in the original Doom? Whatever the case, this version of Doom is a vast improvement on the previous game in the series.

This is a return to the pure shooter style of early FPS games. There are a few cut scenes and all that, but who cares. The killer feature here is the ability to pull off gory finishing moves in order to gain health and ammo. And you are not just running backwards. The level design is impressive. They are bright a spacious with lots of verticality and room to move. And you will have to keep moving as the onslaught of demons is relentless.

OCD gamers can scour levels for secrets and challenges. I was just content blasting away.

Drupal 8 Migration

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I have resisted migrating this site to Drupal 8 for years. Every time I looked into it there was some killer feature that D8 couldn’t do. The times I attempted testing out the process it was always a complete disaster. Well, time is running out on Drupal 7. The old system is slated for end-of-life in 2020 and it’s now or never for the “upgrade.”

In this post I am going to recap my experience in migrating a fairly simple Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8. Hopefully, someone facing the same issues as me will come across this post and will find something helpful.

Long story short, the migration process sucks bad. If you don’t have a little experience with directly manipulating a database or troubleshooting software in general, don’t even attempt it.

I am not a command-line guy. This was going to be a drush-free migration.The whole push in Web development towards command-line apps for everything has been one of the worst things to happen to the Internet. It is virtually impossible for a beginner to just jump in and start creating content. Developers have made huge strides in interface usability and yet the tools to create those interfaces are nightmares of horrible UI design puzzle-boxes that exist mostly as job security for entrenched Web devs. Thank Shatner for the few out there like Prepros.io who are at least trying to make new technologies user friendly.

The first hurdle for me was finding a decent local development environment that could handle Drupal 8. My old standby, Xampp, has become garbage in recent versions with no 64-bit support and no interface improvements. I found Wampserver64 and it has turned out to be fantastic. Most importantly, it allows me to run two different local domains, which is required as the migration process works by sucking an old site into a new one rather than overwriting an exiting Drupal 7 install.

After setting up a clean Drupal 8 install with all the migration modules installed I set about creating a plan of attack. Oh, as an aside, whatever you do, do not install the Migration Example modules. It will fill your new site with a bunch of garbage content and fields that don’t get removed when you uninstall the module. My first order of business was to determine which I my D7 modules had D8 versions. A spreadsheet and lots of notes proved helpful. I tried to limit only the most integral modules and skip any ones that are just cosmetic. A lot of popular modules have been added into the core, but in many case they are watered down versions (Menu Block stands out as particularly bad).

Migration Begins

At that point I clicked all the buttons, watched and waited. It looked like most of the content came over but there are big problems with text-filters. If they don’t match with the new D8 filters, the content won’t render. That is really dumb. I had to log in too phpMyAdmin to manually change values. The next big problem was that my post were peppered with strange characters. This had to do with my Sql server not having correct character encoding. This article explains the fix you should do before migrating (I had to search and replace for hours because I failed to do this). Basically, add the following to mysql.ini:

[client]
default-character-set = utf8mb4

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8mb4

[mysqld]
character_set_server=utf8mb4
collation_server=utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Comments

The next big problem were comments. Only the most recent comments were rendering and I couldn’t see any difference between those and the bad ones. There appeared to be two tables for comments in the database: comment_field_data and comment__comment_body. Turns out if the langcode column doesn’t match between these two tables, the comments don’t render. More stupidity. Had to manually add “en” to the fields. Thankfully this site doesn’t have that many comments.

Page Caching and Dev Environment

The next step was setting up the local.settings.php to disable caching and render theming helper code. A couple YouTube videos explained this pretty well, although I still am having to flush the cache to see changes half the time.

Views, Oh God Views

Views is a fantastic module. It’s the reason we all use Drupal in the first place. So, why the holy hell aren’t views migrated by default?! So freaking annoying! I had to recreate about 15 custom views manually in order to get many of the site features back. Don’t delete that Drupal 7 site yet. You will definitely need it for reference.

Turning on the Modules

I then started installing and enabling various modules. Like I said earlier, things are different here in Drupal 8. Menu_Block is missing features, Menu_Position is just plain broken (a fix is in the works), Redirect is flaky and throws errors.

Everything to do with CKEditor is horrible. TinyMCE was orders of magnitude better. More robust, more advanced features, better looking, better integration with Drupal… sigh. I have a feeling I am going to be using code view a lot with CKEditor.

Pages of Fun Theme Redux

If there is one area where Drupal 8 is leaps and bounds better than D7 it’s the new Twig-based theming system. The syntax is far less cryptic. A simple {{ content.field_myfield }} renders a field. Perfect. My theme is far simpler than before, yet looks pretty good. Lots of fancy CSS layout tricks here that probably fail in Internet Explorer.

Launching the Site

So, after about two weeks of poking at it, I finally launched the site on December 19th. Within about 30 minutes I got my first spam comment. I do miss Mollum. I’ve tracked down a few anti-spam modules, but it’s going to be tough. I gave up on comments on the Nonagon.us site long ago and this may be a losing battle. Out of my cold dead hands Russian bot farms!

And here we are, a couple days in and things seem to me working okay. I’m sure I will need to upload fixes very soon. There are always sections of the site I miss. And when my first round of analytic come in I may need to start hunting down broken links. In the meantime, click around and enjoy. (And buy my art!)