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

Building a map editor


As we are building a tile-based isometric map, the whole map is composed grid-by-grid. Every grid is set to a number which represents the graphic of that grid.

When the map dimension is getting larger and when the amount of maps is getting bigger, inputting the texture information into the external map data file can be time-consuming. We usually build a map editor for fast development on the huge amount of map data. Like Warcraft has its own map editor, we will have our own editor for the Flash virtual world.

Building a map editor here can also be a good summarized example for the whole chapter. We will make use of different techniques that we learned in this chapter including tile texturing and coordination conversion.

  1. 1. Create a new Flash document.

  2. 2. Copy the previously created IsoTile movie clip into the library.

  3. 3. Drag the 10 instances of IsoTile movie clip on stage from the library.

  4. 4. Name the 10 IsoTile instances as brush1 to brush10.

  5. 5. Create a button on stage...