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

Extending the virtual world to other platforms


SmartFoxServer is a real time socket server that was designed for Flash originally. After years of improvement from the SmartFoxServer team, it has become a generic socket server that can be used on different platforms. They now provide support on Java, .Net, Objective-C, and JavaScript. It is possible to build up similar real-time virtual worlds in Google Android, iPhone, and iPad platform. We can download the APIs from SmartFoxServer's API Central web page (http://smartfoxserver.com/labs/API/).

Apple iOS

With Objective-C client API, we can extend the virtual world to Apple iOS platform, which does not support Flash. Apple iOS platform has a large user base and has the ability of playing the virtual world on this platform, meaning we can reach a lot more potential players and generate more revenue from it.

.Net and Unity

Unity (http://unity3d.com/) is a 3D game engine that is free for publishing web-based 3D games. It also comes with paid...