King - long live the king!

Card games have been played and will be played. Over the millennia, gamblers tried hundreds of games and left a dozen for themselves. For centuries. If you look like literary critics, then any card games will be reduced to three plots - poker, preference and gin. For example, a fool is a simplified preference, a sort of trump ration.

I don’t know how it is now, but we in the school and in the fur-mat were cut in preference days and nights. Some managed to play lectures in an audience of 16-24. It is convenient there. Rows - like in a circus. Because MSS, many do not know.
Girls preferred to play Kinga , ladies' preference. Good family game.
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Easy algorithms, easy to program. As soon as I had a desktop PC and a Turbo Pascal compiler , the first thing I wrote was a computer version of this game. It was 1991, maple leaves were falling. The i286 was playing for the rivals, the classic minimax could not be realized. The program honestly calculated the optimal response at a depth of 3 turns. With a depth of 4, the computer periodically went into thought for 30 minutes, which even the most stupid live players did not allow themselves. I logged in to the game with a 5-digit password (then it was fashionable). Password - subscription index of the popular newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda , and the prompt was directly on the password entry screen.
Journalists of Komsomolskaya Pravda called me a couple of times to tell me about the game, but I refused. Not because it was modest, but because there was no toilet paper at that time, people used newspapers. It’s clear where my article will go ...

King I under DOS

The first King was launched in the MS-DOS 2.0 operating environment. How was the game created?
Making card games is easy. It is enough to draw 32 maps and know the screen resolution. The screen at the time of DOS was 640 by 350, the cards were 64 by 96 pixels.



The cover for the cards was pulled from the tapeworm, pictures for the ladies and kings were painted by him, holding before his eyes images of famous Soviet cartoon characters from Winnie the Pooh to Cheburashka. He took pictures from magazines - there were no video cassettes with bright covers at that time. A couple of years later, the first hand scanner appeared - the quality of the image depended on the accuracy of your hand. Whack! Spend a scanner on the magazine and ready. The pictures were black and white and small in size, and the scanner seemed like a miracle.

The game was quite popular, spread across the former Union on diskette. No money brought, at that time there was no money. There were food stamps and men's underpants.

King II under Windows 3.1

The second King was re-released under Windows, made in Visual Studio 2.0 in C ++. The transition to a new paradigm in 1997 was hard for me, I thought in Pascal linearly, and here there were some classes, some events. The brain was not ready. Nevertheless, I made the game under the hard resolution of the Windows-window 640 by 480, the size of the maps remained, 64 by 96 pixels. The quality of art has changed - I did not draw maps, but pulled it out of solitaire.dll. Branded microsoftware images I inserted into the application.

There was a variant of the game with two blockheads and a live opponent. The network game was made for the internal secret structure of our mathematical department (1500 people) and did not go beyond the limits of the institute. For remote game I used MFC sockets.

King III under Windows CE 2.0

The third King was made for iPaq 3700 in 2002. The first handheld computer, a fairy tale. Glitchy, but with Windows. The transition for development from MS VS to MS Embedded Studio was how to transfer from VAZ 2103 to VAZ 2101. Very natural. The size of the cards has been halved in each direction. The new screen size is 240 by 320 forced to change the image. On the surface of the map, only the value and the suit remained. The rest was annoyingly small and not informative. The process of installing the application on the device was also annoying. Many magic dances. The emulator worked well and quickly. Touching the screen was carried out using the stylus. Since then I hate styluses. They hold their hand and get lost. Of course, in half a year, all the owners of handhelds used toothpicks instead of lost styli.

King IV under Symbian

The fourth King was made for the Nokia 9210 in the same 2002 year. It was not just a handheld computer, it was a communicator, a telephone. Legend. Epoc32. The same C ++, but slightly different organization of output bitmaps. Development under Symbian did not cause difficulties. The size of the cards returned to the original, because the screen size was 640 by 200, which reminded the first black and white CGA mode.



The emulator started, but very slowly - each launch was accompanied by a 1-minute wait. Praise be to Allah, the Internet and information appeared, which DLL to take from the computer so that this delay was not. To install Nokia PC Suite, you had to not only dance, but dance with a tambourine and Na-na songs. By the way, the phone is still in working condition.

King V under AS3.0

The fifth King was made in 2007-2008, when I learned the initial course of flash animation and got a tool for development. I bought this Adobe FLEX tool officially for $ 100 at a kiosk on Komsomolskaya Square. The check has been preserved.
The size of the screen and the size of the cards began to change dynamically, the quality of the picture has not changed. It was not possible to develop the game, because Mr. iOS came.

King VI for iOS 2.0

The sixth King was made for the iPhone in 2009. The screen size is 320 by 480, the optimal card size is 66 by 96. This size is preserved for all further versions of the iPhone and I recommend it to you. I drew maps in a hurry, considering that the process is important, not the design. However, thanks to the card game, I learned to work in Photoshop. I made the images of maps realistic, as if worn from time to time.



The game was paid for (0.99), then free, and for 4 years brought $ 229 and 11864 downloads (see figure).

King VII for iOS 7.0

The seventh King was made yesterday and became free. I wanted to remake the game in accordance with the spirit of the time - a flat design, animation, rotation, flips, ritbergers.
Rate what happened.



The mighty Internet gave me a lot of pictures, I chose the heroes from South Park, in my opinion it turned out perfectly, in the style of iOS 7.
The intelligence of the game is low, but I think, I think about the algorithm of the game for the computer.



Thank you for your attention, in conclusion I publish a link to the game, for free, all inclusive

• King of hearts