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

Summary


Social network services are so hot now on the Internet that people's behaviors are influenced by their friends on social networks. Integrating the Flash virtual world with social networking features can help to spread the virtual world. News and screenshots of the virtual world will spread from one friend to other friends and increase the exposure.

There are too many social networking services to cover all of them. We just discussed several key features of Facebook and Twitter. As almost all social network services provide API for third-party developers, similar techniques can be applied to integrating the Flash virtual world into other social networks.

We have discussed and created a very basic Flash virtual world in the previous chapters. In the next chapter, we will discuss the deployment and maintenance of the virtual world. We will also have a brief introduction on how we can extend our virtual world into other platforms that SmartFoxServer supports.