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

Background


In the 70s, there was MUD. MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon and it is a text-based virtual world that players connect to through Telnet. Players connect to the MUD and interact with others or the world by inputting commands. They get feedback and information from text description. Later in the 80s, some graphical virtual worlds based on MUD were released. They were actually MUD which changed the present method from text to graphic and from command input to GUI input.

Later, Ultima Online (http://www.uoherald.com/) and EverQuest (http://www.everquest.com/) brought multiplayer virtual worlds to a new level. World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) and Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) followed EverQuest and they all made the trend of online games and virtual worlds.

In recent years, Flash virtual world is becoming more popular. Many new virtual world communities released Flash-based instead of traditional installer-based. In the beginning, Flash virtual world is not mature due to the performance issue of Actionscript 1 and old Flash player. After the introduction of ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3, the programming language has been enhanced and the performance of Flash player boosts to support better network connections and better graphics. This makes the spring of Flash virtual world.