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 6. Walking Around the World

Walking is an important activity of the virtual world. Most of the time the avatars are walking around to explore the world, to socially interact with people, and to play different types of games inside the world. Moving the avatar in real-time multiplayer network may also have synchronization issues that need to be fixed and for you to be aware of.

In this chapter, we will discuss the synchronization issues of the movement when using either keyboard or mouse input. We will also focus on different path finding approaches and discuss when to use which. We will also discuss some basic movement synchronization techniques.

This is a list of what we are going to learn in this chapter:

  • Extend the avatar class to provide walking functions

  • Basic movement synchronization over the network

  • Basic concept of the path finding technique

  • Choosing a right path finding

  • Scrolling the world

  • Accessing database via server-side extension