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