title: Selective Ruby array slicing
body: <p>I've been slowly learning Ruby (at this point, maybe the first language I've invested any amount of time in actually learning) so this is probably going to be a very simple question for many of you.</p>
  
  <p>My toy project for my studies is, basically, a roguelike. Currently, I have a Map class that contains an array of Tile objects representing, of course, each tile in the entire map. I'm attempting to create a method that will return a smaller array (most likely example would be to display the currently viewable area of the map).</p>
  
  <p>My problem comes down to this. Since the array containing all these tiles is single-dimension, I can't seem to think of a clean way to slice pieces of this array out based on two x,y coordinates that the method takes to determine what to return. In other words, I can't seem to find a clean way to translate between the two coordinate pairs without some fairly ugly looking code and I get the idea that there's a very simple way to do this that is just not 'clicking'.</p>
  
  <p>Ideas anyone? I'm open to some pretty crazy suggestions!</p>