Prelude
Developing a game for iOS
Promotion of the game
Purely neighing

Prelude

This story happened in May exactly on the bench where Berlioz and Bezdomny had argued about the essence of Christ. My friends and I also argued about the possibility of making money on our iPhone-game. I said, suddenly, that without investing money it is impossible. Reluctantly my opponents agreed. I strengthened the trolling and added: - My friends, without big money it's absolutely impossible! Any amount less than $ 25,000, spent on the promotion of the application - will turn into a zipper. Пшшшш!

Everyone was indignant and drove me off the bench. At the same time, and from Moscow.

Following the publication of

Following the publication of the flared up serious competition for the Cup 26-08.
Players with Habra are so strong that on the first day they kicked me from the top of Olympus. But! In the first tower I found a solution for 2 points better than the others. And I won guys from Ukraine and Russia.
We can still!

Everything should be stated as simply as possible, but not simpler.
 - Albert Einstein

To make the game entertaining and interesting, it is not necessary to make computer-controlled opponents smarter. In the end, the player must win. However, letting him win only because the manager of the opponents of AI is badly designed, is also unacceptable. Interest in the game can be increased if the mistakes made by the enemy are intentional. Carefully adjusting the mistakes of opponents, making them intentional, but believable, programmers will allow opponents to look smart and at the same time ensure the victory of the player. In addition, by monitoring AI systems and appropriately controlling them, you can turn situations in which opponents look silly into an interesting gameplay.

A common mistake in the development and implementation of AI systems in computer games is in too complex a design. The AI ​​developer can easily get carried away by creating an intelligent game character and losing sight of the ultimate goal, namely, creating an entertaining game. If a player has the illusion that a computer opponent is doing something clever, then it does not matter how the AI ​​(if any) creates this illusion. A sign of a good AI programmer is the ability to resist the temptation to add intelligence to where it is not needed, and to recognize situations in which more "cheap" and simple solutions are enough. Programming AI is often more like art than science. The ability to distinguish between moments in which cheap tricks are enough, and those where more complicated AI is required, is not easy. For example, a programmer, having full access to all structures of game data, can easily cheat by making the NPC omniscient. NPCs can know where the enemies are, where the weapons or ammunition lies, without seeing them. However, players often recognize such cheap stunts. Even if they can not determine the very nature of cheating, they may have a feeling that the behavior of the NPC is not like the natural.

In this series of articles, I'll talk about the internal Android device - about the boot process, about the contents of the file system, about Binder and Android Runtime, about what they consist of, how the applications are installed, running, interacting with each other, about the Android Framework, and on how Android provides security.

Really old story, but still...
Let me tell you a story about a QNX-based computer that ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 15 years. The computer was running just fine until… well, I’ll get to that part in a minute.

The story begins in the mid 1990s, when a paper manufacturing company installed the computer to monitor pressures, temperatures, and a variety of other parameters at a rate of 5000 times per second. A few years later, the company installed a second QNX computer and configured it as a hot standby for the first. That way, if the first computer ever went down, the second one could immediately take over.

For more than a decade, this safeguard proved unnecessary. But recently, the second computer reported that it could no longer communicate with its partner. Assuming that a software error had occurred, the company called in an IT consultant to fix the problem.

Assuming that a software error had occurred,
the company called in an IT consultant.
But what they really needed was a detective.