Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

June Monthly Memento, fundraiser update, boring server migration progress
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-06-11 20:26:25 [Permalink]
Hey folks, I said in my last MotD that for boring technical reasons I'd be disappearing into the Code Mines for months on end with no new features for y'all and by the way can I please have some money. "Sure," you said, and my goodness thank you. We're still about five grand in the hole from these shitty three months, but that's a damn sight better off than we were when I started the fundraiser about three weeks ago. I'm gonna keep it going a bit longer, but your support so far has blown me away.

June's Monthly Memento is Pride Motherfucker. Remember Motherfucker, from the February 2016 Monthly Memento? Well, I wanted to do something for Pride month, and then I went oh wait every month is Pride month here, and the people making the most money from Pride month are massive corporations run by far-right arseholes who'll sell us rainbow stuff with one hand while giving money to a full-on trans genocide politician with the other, and oh but doesn't that mean we've gotta be extra loud, and oh but Pride is special and we should do something special, and oh this is starting to feel increasingly like the Capitalist Pressure To Do Something Special For Christmas, But In June, and feelings, so many conflicting feelings you guys, so I invented a new character for when you're queer but also feeling like eating out of a dumpster would be fine, and his name is Pride Motherfucker. Get him if you're feeling gay, trashy or both. He'd say "Trans rights are human rights" but he's a raccoon and doesn't speak much English, so Improbable Enterprises says it instead.

Y'all deserve an update on how the server migration preparations are going. Warning: this is boring.

So since we last swapped servers, and also incremented PHP versions, a couple things got EOL'd from PHP. The each() statement is what fucked the Island up good and proper when trying to fire it up in PHP8, because each() isn't a thing anymore. Now I never used each(), always foreach() instead, but the older parts of the game code looooved it some each(). So, every single function that used each() had to be refactored.

Then, join() got changed about too, now being an alias of implode() and being picky about whether you pass the array or the delimiter first. A sensible change, but again one that required a lot of bollocking about.

That wasn't too bad. The database changes are what's taken the longest time so far - MySQL will now throw an error if you enter 0000-00-00 00:00:00 as a date in a datetime column (there are settings you can change to ignore that, but that's just kicking the can down the road and we'd be fucking with it more in a few years anyway), I guess because there's no such date as the 0th of month 0. Things like the column "clanjoindate" are set to 0000-00-00 00:00:00 if you haven't joined a clan, and there were scores more just like that, so that necessitated both database changes and bollocking about with the PHP code so that it no longer looks for the Forbidden Numbers.

So, yeah, Big Fucking Job so far. I haven't even told you about the translations engine, hoo boy, but one positive bit of this is that regardless of the hardware upgrade - and it'll be a major hardware upgrade - the Island will run much faster.

Actually fuck it yeah I'm gonna tell you about the translations engine, but real short version: for incredibly dull reasons I've had to manually check every single line of text in the game code. This has allowed me to find some places where the writing hasn't aged well, and find some modules that just plain suck, and it's given me the opportunity to rework a couple things, correct some formatting errors, update some jokes that were the height of fashion in the It's Cool To Be Edgy era of internet, and generally tidy stuff up as I go along.

I'm by no means finished and there's a lot of work ahead of me, but I feel pretty good about what I've managed to accomplish in the three weeks or so since we got word that we had a deadline for the changeover.

I really sincerely appreciate your cold hard cash support as well as your patience as I grind through this stack of shite. You might've seen me bitching about the workload in Banter and commiserated with me, and I appreciate that too, a whole bunch.

More coming, and have fun,

~CMJ

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