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

Ordering the buildings


Now we are facing a new problem with the buildings. The buildings are not well placed on the map. They overlap with each other in a very strange way. That is because we are now viewing the 3D isometric world in 2D screen with wrong ordering.

When we view the 3D perspective in the following way, the closer objects should block the view of the objects behind. The buildings in the preceding image do not obey this real-world rule and cause some strange overlapping. We are going to solve this problem in the next section.

Ordering the movie clips in Flash

In Flash, every movie clip has its own depth. The depth is called z-order or the z-index of the movie clip. A movie clip with bigger z-order number is higher and covers the others with lower z-order when overlapping. By swapping their z-order, we can rearrange the movie clips on how they overlap and create the correct ordering of isometric buildings.

Determining an object's location and view

According to our tile-based...