• Ruby 1.9.1
• Rails 2.3.2
• Any version of MySQL whatsoever
• Any way whatsoever to make my up-to-date Ruby on Rails talk to that MySQL

I don’t care what version of MySQL. I don’t care if I have to force platforms for Gems or recompile or whatever. I never did care, and I’ll happily even dig through code to make manual changes before compiling or what-have-you. What I do care about is actually getting this to work, so I can finally stop tinkering and start doing something productive.

Well, I learned a lot on my way there. I had a glimpse at how extconf.rb works (because I had to figure out correct parameters), I dug through rails sources to find errors that you don’t even want to know about, had another good look at makefiles, and generally tried to understand what exactly didn’t work.

Also, there is a more efficient way to do this, as pointed out by Luis in the comments. Thanks!

So, in the end, it now works

This tutorial blog post on Code Elite was very, very helpful. So were Luis comments here and elsewhere (although me being quite the newbie when it comes to gcc and the likes, they went a bit over my head).

The Code Elite post is not the best at being copy-paste-able though, the formatting kinda ruins that. It does point out the correct steps to getting MySQL to work in Ruby (and consequently, Rails).

Long story short, these are the steps that lead to a working MySQL integration:

1. Download Ruby 1.9.1 MinGW32 and the corresponding developer kit from the RubyInstaller download page. I prefer the zipped version to the one with installer, to be honest, but that’s just me.
2. Get the 32-bit version (not 64-bit, or linking won’t work) of MySQL 5.0 (not 5.1, or nothing will work) from the MySQL download page. Again, I prefer the zipped version.
3. Get the current mysql-ruby source (2.8.1, currently) from its FTP.
4. Put Ruby into F:\Ruby or your path of preference. Add Ruby’s \bin path to your path variable. Close and re-open the command window to update the path.
5. Install Rails – this is easy.

   gem install rails

6. Put MySQL into F:\mysql (or your path, again). No adding to the path yet here.
7. Put the contents of the mysql-ruby package into your Ruby path (I didn’t try other paths) and point your command line there, then run this:

   ruby extconf.rb --with-mysql-lib=f:/mysql/lib/opt --with-mysql-include=f:/mysql/include

8. Run make, then make install. Here is where 64-bit MySQL fails.
9. Add the following to your path variable (substituting your MySQL location): F:\mysql\lib\opt;F:\mysql\bin. Again, close and re-open the command window to update the path.
10. Run this to let Ruby know MySQL:

    ruby -e 'require "mysql"'

11. Get into a command prompt as admin (you might have to right-click a command prompt and “run as admin” to get to this) to install and start the MySQL service. To do that, run these in the mysql\bin directory:

    mysqld-nt --install
    net start mysql

12. Now that the MySQL server is actually running, you can connect to it to change your root password:

    mysqladmin -u root password topsecretpassword

Steps 1-3 are just downloads. Steps 4 and 5 already installs Ruby on Rails completely. Steps 6-12 then are for installing mysql (which is necessary first for the DLLs to be available to the compiler later) and then compiling the mysql-ruby package (driver?) from scratch into Ruby.

Interestingly, step 7 builds the makefile through Ruby (mostly, with some automated C mixed in), while step 8 actually compiles the C source through make and step 10 plugs this into Ruby. Steps 11 and 12 merely configure the MySQL server.

This should be it. And this time, I hope I did no forbidden or ugly things For they know not what they do and stuff.

Keep in mind that much of what I’m doing here is an experiment (and thanks Luis for being so patient with me). I don’t claim to know what works and what doesn’t, I’m just trying to find my way around here. Follow my steps at your own risk – they seem to lead to a working environment for now.

Update 2009-07-03 02:16: There’s a followup post now that does less evil and wrong things, hopefully. It also happens to result in a working Ruby on Rails plus MySQL environment, something this post doesn’t quite achieve.

Getting Ruby to run

Admittedly, I was a little surprised by how easy this was. Get Ruby and the Development kit from here. Extract them (using 7-Zip, which you should use by default anyway), and put all the contained directories where you want your Ruby. Mine resides in F:\Ruby.

Next, add the newly installed bin directory to your path. Quickest way: Open the control panel, search for “environment”, then click “edit the system environment variables”, and add the bin after a semicolon to the “Path” variable. Then, change the path in devkit/msys/1.0.11/etc/fstab to where you put your stuff – you won’t have to do this if you put Ruby into C:\Ruby.

This is what we get:

Ruby Installed

Yay. That was easy. And the greatest thing is that the One-Click installer (even if it’s not entirely one-click, currently) also already adds support for Ruby Gems.

Getting Rails

The next step is to install some gems. There is a long list on Akita on Rails, but after realizing how little stuff works with Ruby 1.9.1 and Windows 7, I chose to (nearly) only install the things I need:

gem install rails

This installs Rails and the gems it depends on.

ImageMagick, and Some More Stuff

Next, since I planned to do so and not out of some technical necessity, we install ImageMagick for Windows – get the newest Win32 Binary Gem version from RubyForge and extract it somewhere. Install the gem by going into the directory it’s extracted into and then executing this:

gem install rmagick-2.10.0-x86-mswin32.gem

Substitute the gem name with the version you’re actually using. Then install ImageMagick itself, with the .exe that you just extracted as well.

If you’re like me, you won’t be able to resist attempting to install some more gems. Here’s a nice video with some suggestions from Railsconf 2009. Personally, I installed googlecharts, twitter, cucumber and pdf-writer, but haven’t gotten to try them out properly yet.

Testing What We Have

We have Ruby on Rails now. Yep, that’s it. Rather painless so far, eh? Test it by going to the directory you want your projects in and typing this:

rails testproject

You’ll see Rails creating plenty of directories and files now. After it’s done, do this:

cd testproject
ruby script/server

Point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:3000/, and you should see Rails, in all its glory:

Rails Installed

Not Installing MySQL

I started out by attempting to install MySQL 5.1, thinking it was stable and all. However, as it turns out, there are plenty of problems with that, and none of them stem from MySQL:

• The mysql gem relies on libmySQL.dll, which has to be in the path.
• The mysql gem is precompiled, there is no 64-bit Windows version, and the 32-bit version relies on msvcrt-ruby18.dll, rather than the newer msvcrt-ruby191.dll.
• There is a segmentation fault that I haven’t found the cause of.

I was able to fix the first two problems by adding the mysql/bin directory to the path, and installing a Ruby 1.8.6 alongside the Ruby 1.9.1 to get the 1.8 DLL – but nevertheless, I never got rid of that segmentation fault, despite multiple reinstalls and even trying MySQL 5.0 instead of 5.1 (Google search for the exact cause, none of the proposed solutions helped).

(Do not install the 1.8 DLL, that’s apparently very evil.)

Nothing worked until I gave it a try with Ruby 1.8.6 (after all, I had that installed from attempting to get that DLL, and only needed to change the path variable and install the rails gem to have a go), and lo and behold everything worked fine.

Which convinced me not that I should use Ruby 1.8.6, there’s too many shiny new features in 1.9.1. Instead, it convinced me that I should forget about MySQL.

Installing PostgreSQL

Since Rails migrations make database dependencies a thing of the past (or at least, to a very, very large extent), I decided to install PostgreSQL instead. Their one-click Windows installer for PostgreSQL 8.3 worked a treat and installed the service and everything just fine. Next step, have Rails be able to talk to it – there are two PostgreSQL gems, only one of which (postgres-pr, not ruby-postgres) currently seems to work in Windows. So let’s get it:

gem install postgres-pr --platform=mswin32

Create Role

(Not sure if the platform is necessary, but it can’t hurt.)

Set up a database user (“login role” in PostreSQL-speak) with pgAdmin – I called mine rails – and give it a password and the ability to create databases.

Now we change the database.yml in the project’s /config/ directory. Open it with some text editor (I like EditPlus myself) and change it to fit your configuration.

This is the database.yml that makes my test project fly:

development:
 adapter: postgresql
 database: testproject
 username: rails
 password: ***
 pool: 5
 timeout: 5000
 host: localhost

Note that host:localhost (or the equivalent for your database) is important, as otherwise Rails will attempt to connect to PostgreSQL using UNIX Sockets – which obviously wouldn’t work. After that, let’s test. Go to your shiny rails project in a command window, and type or paste these:

ruby script/generate scaffold test title:string description:text
rake db:create
rake db:migrate
ruby script/server

After that, point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:3000/tests/ and poke around a bit. You should have your first Rails app running, including all four CRUD actions.

CRUD Running

I Think I’m Done Here

Done after installing aforementioned Firebug (just click “install”), Web Developer (yep, “install”) and Git for msys from Google Code (which seems to work fine so far). There’s a Ruby gem for Git, too; install with this:

gem install git

I then also got gVim 7.3 – not for the faint-hearted, I do have some experience with vim from coding Python on Linux though. I will also test how well editing works with my EditPlus, and probably some IDEs. Either way, I’ll probably make a little personal user interface evaluation post later on.

Looking back to the assessment post, I’m actually not done at all. The following things are still missing – most of them, for a reason:

• ruby-debug doesn’t work with Ruby 1.9.x yet, so that falls flat. It’s merely a wrapper for the built-in debugger though, so I will be able to debug anyway.
• Mongrel has “ruby script/server” produce another segmentation fault, and I don’t want to spend another 7 hours for not finding a solution to it.
• Apache doesn’t make much sense in a pure development environment, particularly not if we don’t have Mongrel anyway.
• Subversion has plenty of versions on their download page. I downloaded the one from Slik SVN myself, but haven’t installed it yet until I actually need it. So that’s technically missing, too.

Where To Go Now

There are some resources that can get you started with your most splendid new Ruby on Rails environment. If you have no idea what Rails is yet or why you should use it, have a look at this presentation. I found the Head First Rails book to be a very good introduction, too. Concerning Ruby, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (available as pdf, too) is both free and great, albeit talking about Ruby 1.8.2, a tiny bit outdated. If you like it thorough, get the book only known as the Pickaxe. It is as good as they say.

Thanks for listening, and I hope I can help one or two among you out. You like it? You hate it? You found something I didn’t? Let me and all your fellow readers know in the comments!

Update 2009-06-23 15:12: There seems to be a way to make the one-click installer build Ruby 1.9.1, guess I’ll have to try that out.

The One-Click Ruby Installer is not dead, and there’s even a design vote for the 1.9.1 website. But since I want my development environment bleeding edge and I want it now, I’ll just have to make do with a manual install. Since I haven’t found a tutorial detailing the steps for that, I’ll just do it from scratch and take you along the ride. Good tutorials I did find are:

• The Best Environment for Rails on Windows, including a rant against IDEs
• Installing Rails on Windows, including a guide for setting up MySQL
• Time For A Grown-Up Server, for adding Mongrel and Apache

So, what do we need, for a full-blown environment?

• Ruby 1.9.1 – obviously, can’t have Ruby without Ruby
• Ruby Gems 1.3.4 – since gems are the Ruby way of distributing anything
• Rails 2.3 – obviously, can’t have Ruby on Rails without Rails
• MySQL 5.1 – the database we’ll use, although others would work as well
• Mongrel 1.1.5 – reliable and secure webserver

That’s it for the start, but for additional tool goodness (and in order to have some of the above run properly in the first place) we need more:

• Git 1.6.3.3 – the version control used by rubyists
• Subversion 1.6.3 – very widespread version control (and I refuse to add CVS to this list)
• MinGW and MSYS – to make sure gems can be installed and compiled if necessary
• Rake 0.8.3 – the ruby version of make
• Ruby-Debug 0.10.3 – who doesn’t like debuggers
• ImageMagick 6.5.3 – can be used by Rails
• Firebug 1.4.0b2 – for debugging web apps’ JavaScript code (requires the Firefox 3.5 beta)
• Web Developer 1.1.6 – for CSS and HTML stuff
• MySQL Control Center 0.9.4 – or an alternative that can admin MySQL databases
• Apache 2.2.11 – front-end webserver for load balancing and whatnot

An intimidating list at first sight, but I did try to get everything I might need in there. The hard part then will be making all of them talk together. Concerning the actual development environment, I am as of yet undecided between gVim and an IDE like Aptana or RubyMine. Both have upsides and downsides.

So, is this list complete, do you see anything I’ve missed? Or do I have anything on it that you think is irrelevant? Let me know in the comments!

So much for talking the talk – the next step will be walking the walk, and I’ll make sure to give you a full tutorial afterwards.

Update 2009-06-24 16:05: Yep, Ruby on Rails is installed. Here is how I did it.

Dead Space

I had heard a lot of positive buzz about Dead Space, the new EA SciFi horror shooter, so my expectations were naturally high. When Steam finally had it (funny enough, I’m one of those odd folks who are up in arms against any form of too rigid DRM except when it’s Steam), and in English too (something that’s nigh impossible to get here in Switzerland in retail, but that’s another issue), I bought it.

So yesterday I tried to play it, with those high expectations, and with disastrous results. Those were my first impressions:

• Odd strafing … When a game moves you forward with speed X when you press “W”, and moves you sideways with a speed close to X when you press “A”, you’d expect pressing both “W” and “A” would move you roughly in a 45° angle? Not in this game, here the angle is closer to 4.5°. That’s a common shooter standard that you chose not to implement there, and it is annoying.
• Aim mode … You can only shoot if you enter aim mode first, which displays those nice targeting dots, but which also slows down your mouse a lot. You know, EA, I do have this custom-built gaming rig with an insane-res laser mouse and a huge mouse pad, and I do play with low sensitivity. I can aim perfectly well without you slowing down my mouse – in fact, I can aim way better if you don’t keep changing my input. This is not a console. At least give me an option to change it.
• Mouse smoothing … Turning off VSync helped a bit, but the smoothing isn’t gone (with 50+ FPS). And there’s no option to switch it off. My mouse movements are rather smooth, thank you very much, and having them artificially smoothened further disconnects me from what’s happening on the screen. And I’m not alone (although I wouldn’t use such strong language).
• Save function … There is none. I have no clue if the game is supposed to autosave or if there’s checkpoints and forced save spots or whatnot. And honestly, I don’t care. A PC game without a save function has to explain to me why it doesn’t have one, preferrably within the first minutes of play. And then the reason better be good, too (like the one in PoP: Sands of Time was).
• Program crash … Right after shooting the first monster, my game crashed. Not just the game, the whole system halted. It managed to do something I didn’t know was possible: It put the video card into an error state where a soft reset didn’t help anymore (the BIOS then beeped “video card error”), a hard reset did luckily. I’m sorry, EA … is my run-of-the-mill 8800GT (market share according to Valve: 12%, drivers updated) too exotic for you?

All in all, I can confidently conclude that something is wrong in the EA PC testing department. And I can even point to what it is: The ones testing PC games there are not actually PC gamers, but console gamers who have to test the PC version as well. No way those huge bloopers would have made it into the final obvious console port otherwise.

It’s just another game that alienates PC gamers by screwing with their conventions in favour of a game experience similar to the one on the console. In case you haven’t noticed: The demographics of PC players and console players might overlap, but have distinct histories and premises.

Now if you’ll excuse me, work first, and I’ll need some Quake Live (or possibly Left 4 Dead) this evening to calm down. Maybe I’ll give Dead Space another try afterward, the story seems to be great so far after all.

Jedi Academy

For a really long time, I’ve been totally neglecting board games, and only concentrated on computer games – starting even before the infamous World of Warcraft, that is, the Discworld MUD and Jedi Academy were my doom even before that (I can’t believe that’s only 5 years ago).

Digger

I had always played computer games, the first game I remember playing is Digger (and it was rather new back then), but most of the time of my life also board and card games beside. And before getting into online gaming like that, I might have played somewhat obsessively and was visiting LAN parties and whatnot, but I played nowhere near as much as what must have been 2002-2007.

But in the last months, a certain gaming fatigue set in and I got back to board games. No game recently could capture my attention for longer than a few weeks, I wonder what my situation with L4D (that I just blogged about) will be a month after release. It might well be because I essentially agree with Brice Morrison when he writes…

While my interests in other media grew substantially more adult – from Nickelodeon to CNN, from Dr. Seuss to George Orwell – [computer] games did not seem to have a more intelligent counterpart for me to move on to.

Gears of War

The piece Why a Game Designer Outgrew Video Games, which I found via Senior Gamer (German, worth a read on its own), does have a point: Games that are more than pure entertainment are rare. Stuff like Gears of War has a target audience that is clearly not me – tag lines it motivates like “are you man enough?” (and console controller optimization) clearly show that. Shooting stars like World of Goo are great and have some socially critical undertones, but even this gem doesn’t try to do much more than what it does best: Be fun.

The Witcher

The conclusion however that this is just the way it is and that there are no mature games is just as easy as it is wrong:

• Yes, we can do something about it. Particularly a game designer can, and thus it’s odd to believe that a game designer can possibly outgrow video games due to video games not being what he thinks they should be.
• There are titles that clearly target a less adolescent audience – The Witcher for example (which I still haven’t played), arguably Left 4 Dead (being so cooperative and all – the few teenies I met weren’t pleasant to play with), the Sam & Max series in all its retro glory.

When that article says that “To many people, games are only allowed to exist for pure entertainment”, it’s certainly right. But that doesn’t mean that those many people can suppress the others. (Indy) Games, unlike the comic books that the article compares them to, can set themselves free of traditional distribution methods, and a game sold via internet can reach its target audience even if it is in the minority. It won’t be an AAA title, nor have the budget for it, but graphics aren’t everything, right? Indy games are to AAA games what webcomics are to comic books; an alternative and a stepping stone.

As harzzach writes in a followup to his previously mentioned post in Senior Gamer, it’s one defining quality that gamers that have been around for a while primarily look for in their games:

Einen ganz wichtigen Punkt für meine Liste “Was muss ein Spiel für Erwachsene enthalten?” habe ich nun gefunden, respektive bestätigt.

Charme!

Everybody's Golf 2

Games that want to capture me have to be charming. Some might be mere distractions, but they have to be aware of that, can’t take themselves too seriously, and have to be good at distracting. Others might want to make me think, then they have to be good at that. Essence counts.

That perfectly explains why I had an Everybody’s Golf 2 spree, too: The characters are so adorably cute, their unlocks add a huge level of customization, while levelling they grow to your heart, the golf courses show that the designers spent a lot of sweat and effort into making them both unique in theme and offering distinct challenges each, and they spent a lot of time working around the PSPs limitations in ways that make the game look great despite not being utterly high-tech.

One last thing: Keep in mind that nowhere in this post did I talk about red pixels. It’s not depictions of blood that make a game mature. I do want to throw in however that if a game has a theme where blood does fit in, I find it silly to have more severe constraints than, say, on TV shows and movies. Games can be morbidly charming, but don’t have to be charming just because they have splatters of blood – for some, quite the opposite is true. I could write more about silly kinds of censorship but won’t, at least not now.

World of Goo

The game we’re looking at is World of Goo, created by the independent developer 2D Boy. It’s out since October 13th, was available on Steam but isn’t anymore in Europe due to some contract confusion – but you can still buy it directly from 2D Boy. I preordered mine from there, and it went entirely smooth.

Oh, something of note: The game comes without DRM! From the mail I got that told me my preorder copy was ready:

World of Goo has absolutely no copy protection or DRM at all, since we want to give you (and everyone) the best experience we can. Thanks for not distributing this, and helping us make this possible!

This means that I’d have bought the game even if it’d have been less great Too rigid DRM has the effect of not letting me buy it, last time that happened was with the Spore I was looking forward to so much

Graphics:

The graphics are utterly cute and charming, perfect for a casual game like this.

Miss World of Goo

Every level has a unique style, the goo balls have a quirky personality and hop around, the backgrounds and level overviews are marvellous. Each chapter has a distinct style, too, four of the five are seasonal and the fifth … is a secret.

Sunset with Goo Balls

The reason why you don’t see five stars here is because the (fixed) resolution they chose is merely 800×600 – while actually playing the pixels don’t bother that much really, but it’s not perfect, and only perfect gets 5 stars.

A nice touch is that the low resolution kinda reminds of those retro classics we all love so much…

Sound:

The only nitpick I have here is that the tracks are rather short (about a minute each) – there’s plenty of them (although they do repeat towards the end), and they greatly support the gameplay and feel of the levels as well. The goo balls make cute little “plop” or chattering noises whenever you pick them up, or drop them, or fling them, or whatever else you can do with them.

Gameplay:

The goal couldn’t be simpler in principle: Guide the goo balls to the exit, collect as many of them as you can by building close to the exit pipe and letting them jump out. The first level has a great sign showing how to do things:

First Level

That’s all the instructions you’ll ever need. Well, and the time trackback feature, another such shield.

The complexity doesn’t come from an overly complicated user interface, but from the different types of goo, and the levels themselves. Whenever you start thinking you might get bored by what you’re currently doing soon, there’s a new level with an entirely new challenge, new types of goo, new ways in which they stick to each other, new ways of interacting with them, and new obstacles to overcome.

But the changes are introduced so carefully that you barely notice you’re playing an entirely different game, it feels totally the same although you’re not using the same mechanics nor components anymore…

Different Way of Doing Things

Some of the levels really are positively hard. For one, I even had to cheat and look it up in their forums.

If you’re bored in the end after all, you can always ramp up the difficulty by trying to get OCD flags for the levels (Obsessive Completion Distinction Criteria) – those require you to finish the level faster, or bring more goo balls to the pipe, or only use a select number of turns.

Fun:

Oh, as if I hadn’t mentioned “fun” enough by now. This game is the most fun game I’ve played in years, period. With some social criticism and dark humour thrown in, of course. The learning and motivation curve are just perfect – you really see that these developers have something so many titles lack these days: Love for their game.

The game isn’t really meant to be one that wastes your time for years and years, like MMOs or online shooters are, so longevity is less of a criterion. Nevertheless, the OCD help there as well, and going back to earlier levels after more experience in more complicated ones is a rewarding experience. Additionally, the game is entirely a puzzler but nevertheless has a story worth of note.

And there’s always the World of Goo Corporation’s tower building minigame to keep you interested after you finished the levels, I had the 25th-highest tower worldwide for a few seconds. Too bad I had built the top bits a wee bit unstable and it crashed horribly.

Overall:

I was very, very tempted to give 5 stars, but the game does have some shortcomings. Since everything else is totally awesome, and it’s easy to find reviews that list what’s good, I’ll list those shortcomings here:

• There are some remaining bugs – I had a two or three crashes. One of them actually deleted my entire profile as well, so I had to start from scratch – luckily, that happened shortly after I reached Chapter 2 for the first time only.
• The music does get a bit repetitive – not because the tracks themselves wouldn’t be great, but because they’re so short.
• The game overall is somewhat short, although Ron Carmel (one of the devs) was probably right when he said that “Beyond the moon chapter in the European version, there will be no extra content. I think we’ve reached the point with this game where more is not better.”

But keep in mind that the game only costs $20, and is from a studio that consists of two people. And has no DRM. Before that background, I should maybe give the fifth star after all (but I won’t, can somebody bind my hand on my back please?)…

Anyway: Go buy it, now! This game finishes the discussion whether games can be art, simply by being art.

Update 2008-10-15 15:24: Gee, if you’re not convinced, there’s a demo now (the entire first chapter), via Rock Paper Shotgun. And you seem to be able to change the resolution with a little hack, although it didn’t quite work for my 1280×1024 (1024×768 went fine though).

OK, watched them all? Good. It’s important to acknowledge that Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has done more than do good reviews destroying flames himself, he also invented a style of rambling (in)coherently in short movies without many stops, underlined by drawings.

Daniel Floyd then has picked up this style (he makes no secret of being inspired by Zero Punctuation) and made something else with it -- thought-provoking little episodes of game developer goodies.

Now, the newest of those just came out just two days ago, is about tangential learning in games and how purely educational games aren’t fun, and I haven’t seen it until today. You should watch it, too.

Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun, who got it via Edge. And here’s the link you’re looking for after watching it.

And, just in case you missed the former ones, here they are, in inverse chronological order because we started from the newest one anyway. This one is about sex in games (I admit, putting it into the title was click bait, but the lecture thingy is very good anyway):

And finally, storytelling in games:

And of course, he has a YouTube channel as well.