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 buddy list


Besides public chatting, players often want to communicate with their own friends. The friend list in virtual world is called buddy list.

Buddy list is like the friend list in an instant messenger application. Players can add other players as friends into their buddy list. The design of buddy list is to help them communicate easily. They can know which friends are online. They can know the latest status of their friends. They may know where their friends are now and they can send private messages to them easily.

There are two modes of buddy list provided by SmartFoxServer — the basic version and an advanced version. This setting can be set in the config.xml in server.

By default, the old depreciated buddy list setting is located as an attribute in the Zone tag.

<Zone name="virtualWorld" customLogin="false" buddyList="20">

The new method is to delete the buddyList attribute and use the BuddyList tag as the following:

<BuddyList active="true">
<mode...