Book Image

Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds

Book Image

Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds

Overview of this book

Flash virtual worlds are some of the most exciting—and profitable—online business being built today. Using Flash, developers can build interactive environments where users can interact with the virtual world and one another, compete, and have fun. Creating a playful environment on an electronic network presents unique challenges as you combine a fun, upbeat frontend with some serious and complex server logic. This handy book assists you in building amazing virtual worlds in no time by implementing ActionScripts in a Flash IDE. With this book in hand, you will build virtual worlds that have avatars walking around and interacting with non playing characters, completing challenging quests, and allowing users to link with real-world friends. The fun begins with first exploring existing virtual world games such as Club Penguin, Mole, Dofus, and World of Warcraft. We will then design our virtual environment. Then we will create avatars and move the avatars in the virtual world. We will add some triggers to add amusement and life to the virtual world. We will allow the avatars to interact with other players and create a buddy list for each user. Then we will integrate buildings and other environment to the virtual world. We will also let the players interact with non-player characters to complete some tasks. Finally, we move on to add interesting quests to the virtual world, which need to be accomplished by the player to gear up to the next level of the game. This example-rich, hands-on guide sequentially develops a multiplayer virtual world—the platform, the environment, quests, avatars, non-playing characters, and interaction between them.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

The whole picture of virtual worlds


We have brief ideas on the socket server, client-server concept, and the application architecture now. It is time to put them together to get whole concept of how a virtual world works. The following figure shows the components for a virtual world:

The socket server is the core part. There is a database to store permanent data such as user account info. A server-side extension lets developers program server-side logic, which is related to the virtual world, such as a virtual items exchange or virtual money transaction.

A server-side management component is in charge of following tasks:

  • Handles and manages all socket connections

  • Manages the memory of zones, rooms, and users

  • Dispatches events and messages to appropriate clients, such as send messages when someone left the room

  • Calls server-side functions when client requests, such as create room or send public message

  • Calls server-side extension by clients requests

Flash client will have some static data of the virtual world, for example, map terrain. It also contains an API for connection to server-side functions.

Usually, there is an admin panel for the virtual world moderator to monitor the whole server. The admin panel can access the server via API and query statistics from the server or perform some admin actions such as server configuration or kick-users.