School

At school I studied at 4 and 5 (on a five-point system), participated in various competitions in the visual arts. At the same time, I attended Photoshop and Video editing courses at the editorial office of the News newspaper and the RenTV channel. Self mastered 3D Max.

 

College

After 10 classes (2006) I went to the Technical and Economic College, specialty "Technology of bread, pastry and pasta". Along with my studies I began to study programming on my own. Since I earned unlimited access to the computer science cabinet, I could use computers for my purposes. At that time, I made my first program “Recipe Calculation” on Delphi7, which automatically displayed a long calculation of the entire technological process.

 

Then later I mastered VisualBasic.Net 2008 and wrote my first game, 3 Thimbles. In this game you need to guess which of the 3 thimbles the ball is under. Since in VS 2008 there is no transparency, special effects and 3D, then without magic there is not done :) In addition, I worked in parallel with my studies, but despite this I successfully graduated from college with Red diploma (with distinction).

 

 

University (2010 - 2015)

Immediately after college I went to university with a degree in Software of computer facilities.

 

In my first year, we had a Visual Basic subject. I told our teacher Indira Rafikovna about my experience, and for the winter holidays she lent me a book "VB.NET Hacks & Pranks" by Alexander Klimov. During this time I have done many interesting things. Seeing this, the teachers suggested that I participate in a student conference among senior students. For all the time, I was the first freshman who participated in the conference, since there were no conferences among the first courses. Having the skills of video editing, I made a beautiful presentation, the most interesting among others.

 

Ariadne's thread

In my second year, I developed a maze generator and an algorithm for exiting the maze for one person, taking into account real conditions (i.e., the wave algorithm isn't applicable here). If there is a way out, this algorithm guarantees 100% of its finding, otherwise all areas will be passed and there won't be a single missed one. Then I made a short film about it and got first place in the competition for this.

 

Star Kombat

In the same year, I independently studied the Unity3D engine and in summer practice I made the basic mechanics of the game Star Kombat. I was afraid that the teachers wouldn't take my work seriously (at that time it was customary to provide only business projects). But the teachers supported me.

 

Power Builder

In this environment, I tried to make a board game. PB is not intended for games at all, it is for databases, business processes. But, oddly enough, it supports video format, which at that time was not in Unity(!)

To eliminate screen flicker, I myself wrote double buffering. I made a navigator like in Photoshop, moving the red rectangle in a small window, you could move around the map.

I really liked the convenient script organization in this environment. However to do something graphically-visual in this environment is really difficult.

 

 

Decision Support System

We had such a subject in our 5th year. The professor - head of department puzzled us to modify the system so that you can enter an infinite number of actions and events for all types of tasks. Failure to fulfill the professor’s condition meant completely failing the subject and, instead of graduating from university, staying for another year for retake. I often saw students who couldn't complete their studies, because they were forced to come to him to resubmit their work, with new additional conditions.

 

Okay, in the task "Wheel of Fortune" for actions I can set the numerical value of the wheel speed from 1rpm to infinity. But, if the wheel stops at a white or red sector, these are only two events, how to generate an infinite number of colors?? How many color names can you remember? Red, blue, green, purple, gold, transparent, gray-coffee-crimson...

What will be 1 000 000+ color? More importantly, how to program this to show a completed work before the end of the week?

 

And I found a solution!

I introduced a fractions of the color. That is, the three components are red, green and blue in a ratio of 1: 1: 1, then I increased the red by one (2:1:1,  3:1:1,  etc.) Thus, an infinite number of shades of red are obtained. The professor approved this decision.

 

Next there was another task. It was necessary to calculate the combination of the bone rolls. But after the 8th roll MS Access reached the internal software limit, the file quickly gained 2GB and became invalid, forever.

 

Before us, students solved this problem using Visual Basic Application, increasing the number of throws to 10. The professor set the condition to break their record, and since these works were freely available and everyone simply copied ready-made solutions, the professor said that he would underestimate the grades of those who use Visual Basic. Therefore, I decided to do everything through queries, only with Access tools.

 

Then I ran into another problem, this is the Poisson formula for probability distribution.

The main snag here in the factorial. The fact is that in Access expressions there is no factorial function, only using Access cannot create a recursive function, there is not even the ability to create a variable for the increment i. I even found on the net a replacement for the Poisson formula without factorial. But the deviation was too great.

 

I have already done a lot of work, too much time has passed. I scolded myself for not using the ready-made solution, like many did. How many problems I could avoid...

 

Once an idea came to me. Yes, I can’t just change the data, because the old records will remain and the new ones will be added to the end. So I deleted everything!  I expressly made two separate tables that overwrite each other keeping only the changes. For the factorial, I developed a certain sequence of actions and recorded them in a macro. Before each factorial calculation, it is necessary to initialize the table responsible for this, i.e. to clear and set a initial values.

 

Also, through intermediate tables, I solved the problem with the number of throws, up to 22

Theoretically, much more is possible. It just took a computer many hours to calculate the solution to these 22 throws, and adding a new throw increases the calculation time by an order of magnitude.

 

 

 

Graduate work

When I asked if I could make a game for my graduation project, the department head allowed but said that it should solve an important problem or business task :)

Then I decided to make an intelligence training game. The game included sections such as deduction, speed of reaction, intuition...

 

The professor required scientific credibility to estimate IQ. After consulting with the psychologist working there, and some researching, it turned out to be not so easy. To study this issue I would need to spend a few years studying at the Institute of Psychology (and it is possible to write a separate scientific work for this). In short, my work failed.

 

Having gathered with the teachers, having consulted, we found a solution not to make a game, but something that would help with its development. It was supposed to be an asset with a universal set of elements from which, like lego, you can make a finished game. And everything that I did before was used.

 

My graduation project had 116 pages printed on a color printer (I wanted to do everything to the maximum). Together with us, students who were supposed to finish their studies last year also presented. I wasn't worried, I was pleased to present the results of my work.

 

After the meeting, we were called to announce ratings. In the first year, there were 600+ students, divided into different groups. By the 5th year, there are only 14 of us left. Of all those present, only 3 students received the highest score (100), and I was one of them.