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

Designing the quest panels


Quest panels are used to display a list of quests to players and perform several quest-related actions such as accepting a quest. There are two quest panels in our virtual world. One is the panel that lists the available quests from an NPC. The other panel lists the player accepted quest log with completed and in-progress quests.

Displaying available quests

When a player triggers the quests event, we will pop up a panel to list the available quests from the NPC. Some quests are disabled because the player has not fulfilled the requirement of the quest. We will focus on listing the quests here and discuss the quest pre-requirement later.

Getting available quests in server-side extension

We retrieve the list of quests for a given NPC. Every quest entry in the database contains a holder field which is the NPC's name that own that quest. We need a server-side extension to query the database and pass the quest list to the quest panel, which is on client-side. We will...