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 4. Creating Map and Ground in Isometric View

Isometric Projection is a common game view that has been widely used for almost 30 years since the 1980s. Thanks to the good-looking 3D depth presentation in 2D coordinate, isometric projection is being used in many games in different platforms. It provides some kinds of 3D depth feeling to the game without handling full 3D coordinates and manipulations. This is an important technique in making Flash game and Flash virtual world because Flash does not support full 3D in mature way yet and isometric game view is one of the best solutions in Flash to provide 3D-like representation.

In this chapter, we are going to learn basic isometric techniques in Flash. The following topics will be discussed:

  • The concept of isometric projection

  • Drawing an isometric tile in Flash

  • Drawing the bitmap graphic textures for isometric map

  • Loading external map data

  • Converting the coordination between isometric and screen

  • Building a map editor

This chapter mainly focuses...