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 5. Creating Avatars

In a virtual world, there is always a character or symbol to represent the user. This visual representation is called creating avatars. It can be a 2D image of the player or a 3D character of the player. Every avatar has different styles and colors, and thus gives personality to the players.

Avatar is very important in a virtual world because most of the features are designed around avatars. Users interact with each other via their avatars, they explore the virtual world via avatars, and they complete challenges to level up their avatars.

In this chapter, we will discuss several important techniques for creating avatars in virtual world. For example, we will discuss how to make an avatar unique by customization, and how to decide the rendering methods and reduce the graphic workload optimally.

We will also integrate avatars with the SmartFoxServer and begin building our virtual world.