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

Existing virtual world games


There are several existing virtual worlds running successfully. Some of them are Flash-based and some are not. We will introduce them here so that we can give them a try and get some inspiration before starting our virtual world design and development.

Club Penguin

Club penguin (http://www.clubpenguin.com/) is a successful story of Flash multiplayer virtual world with SmartFoxServer as backend. It is a kind of casual game virtual world where players explore in a small town and play multiplayer mini games with each other. It can be a good example of what Flash with socket server can do.

Mole

Mole (http://www.51mole.com/) is one of the largest Flash online virtual worlds in China now. It is a casual virtual world game in which players play mini games and some casual quests inside the world. It targets children whose age ranges from 6 to 14. According to a 2010 document, the mole virtual world has a record of 450K peak concurrent players.

Dofus

Dofus (http://www.dofus.com/) is a Flash massive multiplayer online role playing game developed by Ankama from France. Players play against monsters in the virtual world to gain experiences to level up and earn points to buy equipment. Dofus in one of the most successful Flash virtual worlds and has 30 million registered players and 250K peak concurrent connections in 2010.

World of Warcraft

As one of the best-selling virtual world communities, it is worth taking a trial at this game. World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/), also referred as WoW, is a kind of serious game play virtual world that contains a huge worldview and complicated story.

Club Penguin, Mole, and Dofus are Flash virtual worlds but World of Warcraft is not. It is developed in LUA, a scripting language, and C++. WoW is a very huge 3D virtual world that contains over 7000 quests and 40,000 non-player characters. The 3D environment with large graphic assets exceeds the limit that Flash player can handle. According to a document from Blizzard, the company behind WoW, in 2009, the World of Warcraft ran on over 13,000 server instances.