Updating to Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.2

Yesterday evening I went over to @jqr's house for some Rails help and advice. Early into out discussion it became clear to me (and was probably already clear to Eli) that I should redo Manticore.

Here's where it stands now: A whopping 14 models. 14! Why, Tyler? Why did you do that?

Back when I first started working on this project (in April or May I believe) making things that belong_to a Character, such as Hit Points, Armor Class, Statistics and the like, into separate models made more sense to me because they would be easier to edit. It didn't occur to me that if I only wanted to edit a Character's Hit Points, that I could simply render a form that ONLY had that field on it, and edit the record that way.

So after about 3 hours of talking and eating delicious cinnamon buns, @jqr showed me how to think about the problem in a different way. Rather than having modifiers that are specifically called from Statistics and applied to things like Fortitude Saves, or Attack Rolls, I'll have one method for ALL Modifiers, not a thousand different kinds of modifiers. I'm still rolling this around, trying to get a grip on it, but now that I've begun thinking about Manticore in a different way, I think I'll be able to make much more progress going forward. I already GET how to define methods and call them, as well as how to render partials and views that do a variety of tasks, so I'm most of the way there already, right?

Most of my time tonight was spent trying to get Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.2 installed and cooperating. I was getting a ton of BOGUS errors, about Gems that Rails couldn't find. Turns out you have to install a bunch of crazy stuff for 3.1, like Sass, Sass-Rails, Coffee-Script and so on. WEIRD, right?

One cool thing I noticed: I went ahead and created a scaffold for my Character model, and made statistics into attributes of Character. All the statistics are integers, so when it pops up on the form, you get an automatic drop down that just inputs numbers. I'm guessing this is to get around people entering non-integers, and I bet I can pretty easily limit the scope of these attributes.

I don't think updating to Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.2 was strictly necessary, but this seems like a good time to make a change. Also seems like a good time to get more comfortable (re: comfortable at all) writing and running my own tests, considering that's something I've woefully neglected.