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

Debugging in local machine


It may be difficult to debug in a multiplayer virtual world development. Usually we can test the script by putting "trace" in the logic for debugging purpose and view the trace log in the Flash IDE. To debug a multiplayer virtual world, we often need two or more instances running in parallel. They will most probably be running in standalone Flash player or the web browser locally. We will discuss how to set up the Flash player to view the Flash trace log without the Flash IDE.

There is a method to read the trace log without using the Flash IDE. It requires the following files:

  • A debugger version of Flash player

  • mm.cfg file

  • flashlog.txt

Downloading the latest debugger version of Flash player

The default Flash player installed in OS is a normal version without the debug feature. We need the debugger version of Flash player to output the trace log outside the Flash IDE. We will download and install the debugger version of Flash player by going to the following URL...