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

Creating the world


To walk around the world, we need the avatar and the isometric map from last two chapters. We are going to integrate them to construct our virtual world.

The movie clip hierarchy of the virtual world now looks like the following graph. The world is responsible to draw the avatars and hold the avatar list. It also creates the isometric world map. The reason of putting the avatars and isometric map into the world movie clip is that we can easily scroll the whole world by only repositioning the world movie clip. All the avatars and the map will scroll together automatically.

Note

The movie clip architecture

When developing Flash virtual world, it is important to design the movie clip architecture well. A good architecture will glue relative graphic assets together for easy positioning and scaling. It can also make the z-order of the movie clips easier to manage. For example, putting an interface movie clip on top of the world movie clip ensure every UI item is visible without...