What to do for an IT specialist in the army or how I wrote on VBA games

More than two months have passed since my demobilization. I have already mastered the freedom, it's time to tell the truth. I served in intelligence! .. "Secret" military unit, Osnaz GRU. According to the distribution, he got into the department of the central distribution center (Radio Interception Center). The work is not dusty, you sit at night in headphones and listen to the enemy. But this is not about that.

Each operator of the radio interception post (we counted as such) had at their disposal a computer with RPUs (radio receiving devices) connected to it. There was special software + Excel on the computer. Everything else was blocked. After the N-th duty, I began to get bored ... His hands were combed.

I remembered that I had once dealt with VBA. I never went further than writing a simple function. I decided to see what could happen with a more detailed study. After a night of torment, I gave birth to a turtlethe snake! The classic snake, implemented by painting the desired cells. It was possible to create obstacles for yourself, again, just by painting over the necessary cells.



After the snake there was still a couple of small toys, but all these are trifles ... The



co-workers went and begged that I take them off all this, everyone was tired of playing the scarf. I did not know ways to do this. USB ports are hardware disabled. But, as it turned out, all the computers were connected to a local network. Having launched the command line through Excel, I was able to go to the neighboring computer and drop the necessary files there. And then it dawned on me ... Excel, VBA, reading / writing files, local area network ... Dare you?

Sea battle
I realized the first version in the same way by painting the cells of the sheet. For a long time he didn’t show anyone, debugging in the dead of night with a friend.



Everything worked with dignity, but before I rolled out the game to the masses, I saw a project of the guys who served before me. It was a file manager, neatly hidden from the shift supervisor on the computer, implemented on the forms:



Respect these guys. Until now, I have not seen the possibility of using forms on VBA. I did not notice immediately, and did not think about it. That same night it was decided to rewrite the battle on the forms. The code turned out to be more compact, the interface is friendlier, the performance is higher.



The work in the department is up! Everyone loves the sea battle ... except me. Well, I do not like these stupid shootouts. In general, I did not stop there. But, looking ahead, I will say that naval combat was the most popular.

Bomber Man
Someone jokingly said, “Is it weak to write Bomber Man?”.
Challenge accepted! A month of unhurried torment, HE was published.





Thumbnails rendered in Paint. The game is designed for simultaneous connection of 4 people from different computers. Client-server application. The server was started in a separate application. The number of lives is unlimited (I think this is understandable by the number of tombstones).
But everything is not as smooth as it seems. When writing / reading files, there were errors due to simultaneous access and I could not achieve more than 10 frames per second. If the game was for two people, then everything fit into 25-30 frames, but at four I could not achieve good speeds. The lack of internet made it impossible to find a solution.

Then I was asked to make tanks, but from the development of action games, in view of the problems described above, I decided to refuse.

Texas Holdem Poker
I really love poker. He was sorely missed in the army. The implementation of poker for 9 people I have not seen so difficult. Unless I had to rack my brains over the search algorithms for the assembled combination, but it was interesting. The lack of internet made me tense up. One night I spent drawing a deck of cards. Another on the table and chips. And then the writing process began. I got poker faster than Bomber Man. One night we tested it for the maximum number of players, the tests were quite successful.



But it was not possible to play fully. I got pneumonia. After returning to the unit on combat duty (for the post of radio interception), I did not return anymore, and went to outfits before the demobilization.

Generally speaking, it was a very dangerous and painstaking task, God forbid someone burns at such an occupation, and even on combat duty. Those who served will understand. They were removed from duty and put in outfits for an ordinary scarf, but here it is ... Thanks to one good person for taking all these screenshots to a USB flash drive and sending it to me in the mail. I will leave it as a keepsake.

To be continued.