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

Designing a big virtual world


Normally a virtual world contains several towns and places for players to explore. The following screenshot is from the 51mole, a Flash virtual world for children in China. The whole virtual world contains around 25 places with different themes. Some are inside mountains, some are castle, and some are snowing. Players seldom get bored inside such a large and content-rich virtual world.

Dividing the big world

The virtual world can sometimes be very large. We cannot put the whole world into one SmartFoxServer room when it grows big. Putting a large area into one room means that there are more users inside the room. More users means many more broadcast messages for every player's action and this will cause performance and bandwidth problems.

If all parts of the world belong to the same room, all broadcasted events of the avatar will be accessed by all players. On the other hand, in the partitioned world, the broadcast messages are sent only to those players that...