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

Operating the virtual world


Operating the virtual world decides the success and failure after development. A good developed product without good promotion will not sell well. On the other hand, a normal quality product with a good promotion and operation will sell enough to earn money.

Tracking the cost of maintaining a Flash virtual world

There are several costs that we need to know while running the Flash virtual world. Some of the costs charge us monthly while some are one-off payment. We need to calculate carefully if we have a health business model to maintain the Flash virtual world without losing our money.

Paying the hosting fee

The hosting fee for socket server is usually much expensive than normal web hosting. The costs depend on the number of players. If there are few players, a virtual private server for around $50 a month may be enough. If there are thousands of players in the virtual world, we may need some high profile server that would cost several hundred monthly. This expense...