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

Hosting the virtual world


After creating the Flash virtual world, our next issue will be finding a server to host it. As it requires the process execution of the socket server and the use of socket binding, we cannot host SmartFoxServer in the normal web hosting plan. We have two options of hosting. We can either host on hosting that is designed to support SmartFoxServer or hosting that allows us to execute a socket server process.

Hosting that supports SmartFoxServer

Shockwave Server hosting (http://www.shockwaveserver.com/) is the hosting partner of SmartFox that provides hosting that has the SmartFoxServer ready for running. The benefit of using it is that we almost do not need to set up anything to plug in the virtual world code and run on the hosting.

Hosting SmartFoxServer in dedicated server

We can also apply for the hosting of dedicated server or Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. Renting dedicated server or VPS means we have full control of the server that can run anything under...