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

Summary


In this chapter, we have compared several avatar drawing techniques and their usage in Flash. Each of them has its usage and we demonstrated the vector animation methods. It is important to decide which drawing methods to use at the predevelopment stage because that is often difficult to change once the virtual world project is going.

We also discussed on how to work with several user related SmartFoxServer events to manage the user information and graphics when they join or leave the room. We will learn more events in detail because most of the logic is event triggered in a multiplayer virtual world.

We also introduced the usage of user variables, which is a place to store user specific information temporarily. The user variables are useful for sharing some pieces of data between users in the same room.

The avatars now have their own appearance and position. But they cannot move and they are not placed in our isometric map yet. In the next chapter, we will put the avatars on our isometric...