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

Implementing the item panel


Item panel is a place where players organize their items. The following graph shows how we composite the item panel in Flash. The panel consists of a close button and 19 item slots. The itemSlot0 and itemSlot1 represent both hands, and itemSlot2 represent the riding. Players can arrange items within slots. They can put riding item in the riding slot. Riding item is a special item that players can ride on for faster movement. We are going to query items from server-side and display them in this panel according to the position.

Loading the item definition

Similar to the buildings in the previous chapter, we have a definition for all items. We reference items by using their ID and the definition lets us get all the information of the item from the item ID. In this example, we put the item definition in an XML file. In production virtual world, we should keep the definition in the server to prevent users from modifying it in client-side.

public function ItemDefinition...