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

Broadcasting where you walked


We now can move the avatar locally. The next step is to tell all people in the same room to update your avatar on their screen. A most straightforward way is to tell the others your destination point and then they will calculate the path and move the avatar.

This method may work in development mode because we may have only two to four instances testing the virtual world. Imagine that there are 20 users in the room. Now a user walks a path and broadcasts the destination point. All 20 clients have calculated the path once; that's a total of 20 times. Next we have all 20 people walking at the same time. Twenty destination points are broadcasted and all 20 clients calculated 20 paths. That's a total of 400 times. Assume that the average path finding time take 10 ms. This costs 200 ms on each client and it will absolutely drop the frame rate.

Instead of sending the destination point, we send the path finding result. What we benefit is that the other users do not need...