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

Talking with NPC


The players need to interact with the NPCs. Most often players need to ask the NPCs something or chat with them to share information. There are several types of conversation system. Each one comes with its pros and cons.

Note

It is important to choose a right conversation system for the virtual world.

Communicating with NPC using text parsing

Text parsing conversation is a prompt box with a text input box for a player to input the sentence they want to say. After which, the NPC will parse the sentence and respond to the player with related information. It is similar to talking with a chat bot.

Text parsing interaction existed for a long time as old text game without graphic user interface. At that time, the computer was not fast enough so that the system would only parse certain patterns of sentence and certain keywords. It is called Ask/Tell conversation.

Ask/Tell conversation means the player will either ask the NPC something or tell the NPC something. As each NPC has its...