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

Moving the avatar


There are two ways to tell the avatar to walk. Either input by pressing the arrows keys or clicking on the destination point by mouse.

Which method is better? We need to consider both the game play and the network synchronization.

The game play of the virtual world is our first consideration. A virtual world with fighting theme requires players to stick on the keyboard to walk and create key combination attack. On the other hand, our virtual world focuses on social interaction so that mouse input will be the main use.

Movement synchronization

When moving the avatars by keyboard, we may keep sending the "move right" command until the right arrow key is released. In this case, the client broadcasts many same messages to synchronize the movement and will slow down the network.

Note

When we are designing the network game, we need to optimize the amount of commands to send over the network. An average TCP connection can have a lag that ranges between 50 ms to 200 ms. The synchronization...