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


We have introduced the SmartFoxServer and developed the virtual world from the basic avatar movements to the inventory and quests system. We also discussed how the virtual world integrates with existing social network services to help players form their social community.

In this chapter, we discussed how to improve the virtual world from players' behavior by logging and data mining. We also glanced at the possibility of scaling the SmartFoxServer into clustering. We also compared different hosting solutions and their advantages.

Learning how to design and implement the Flash virtual world is just the beginning of the journey. The techniques from this book are the entry ticket to the virtual world industry. Traditional online virtual world has been hot for years but Flash and Flash in mobile is still relatively new. Running multiplayer virtual world in light-weight client such as Flash player and mobile devices is a coming trend after the traditional online games.

There are lots of possibilities...