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

Adding sound to the virtual world


Creating realistic sound effects for the environments is important in the virtual world. It can give the players the feeling of immersing inside the world.

The most basic sound handing method is to play all sounds at the same volume. For instance, a bird is singing in the forest and the avatars are walking on the road. In this case, the user should hear at least the music from the bird and the footfalls.

A better way to handle sounds is to consider distance. For example, the following figure depicts the volume of the bird signing in the room:

The three avatars in the room should hear different volumes of the music from the bird. The closer the avatar, the louder the music. This enhancement lets the players feel that they are in the realistic world. A classical example of sound control in an environment is Age of Empires. You can feel every single sound from the environment played in a designed volume and balance between left/right channels of stereo.

Let's...