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

About the Reviewers

David Crebbin has spent most of his working life developing and architecting client-side applications, with the vast majority of his projects utilizing ActionScript. He's a firm believer in the technology and what it can offer, along with its amazingly creative developer community. He has used the Flash platform to build both small and large scale applications covering e-learning, gaming, and television.

Prashanth Hirematada is the founder of Gamantra, a game technology company focused on Network engine and server platform. Prior to founding Gamantra in 2006, he was a Chief Architect at Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd., where he was responsible for creating a common game development platform for all MMOG initiatives at Shanda. He joined Shanda in 2004 through Shanda's acquisition of Zona, Inc., a MMOG game technology company, headquartered in Santa Clara, U.S.A. At Zona, as a Technical Chief Architect, he was responsible for server-side architecture and implementation of MMOG framework. Prior to joining Zona in 2001, Prashanth worked in various Silicon Valley based technology start-up companies developing software at various levels for well over seven years.

His Master's thesis was a distributed implementation of the Message Passing Library (MPI) on a heterogeneous network of workstations including Solaris, HP-UX, OpenStep, and Windows-NT. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from California State University, Sacramento, California, in 1994 and his B.S. in Computer Science from Bangalore University, Bangalore, India in 1992. He can be contacted at .

Sergey Suchok graduated in 2004 with honors from the Faculty of Cybernetics, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine) and has since then been keen on Information Technology. He is currently working in the banking area and prepares to defend his thesis on the modeling of banking operations. Sergey is the co-author of more than 40 articles and has participated in more than 20 scientific and practical conferences devoted to the economic and mathematical modeling. He is a member of the "New Atlantis" Youth Public Organization (newatlantida.org.ua) and devotes his leisure time to environmental protection issues, the historical and patriotic development and popularization of a grateful attitude toward the Earth. He is also developing a social network for Kombucha's owners called Latusho, and he writes poetry and short stories and makes macramé.