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

Chapter 2. Installing the Servers

If you have ever played Flash virtual world, such as the club penguin that was mentioned in the previous chapter, you may have had the following experience.

You load the web page in web browser and then log in with your username and password. You may need to fill out some basic information for the first time. Then the Flash player is launched and finally you are connected to the virtual world and can interact with others.

The socket server handles the virtual world after the player is connected to the virtual world. What about those web pages for virtual world information and SWF files? Yes, we need another web server and database server to handle the normal web request that is not the multiplayer part.

In this chapter, we will understand the relationship of the servers and install the needed servers one by one to get them to work with each other.

We will cover the following in this chapter:

  • Compare the different features among the SmartFoxServer Lite, Basic...