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

Rapid development with OpenSpace


We introduced the virtual world environment and the movement of the avatars in the beginning of the book. It is good for us to learn the fundamentals of the implementation methods and the design decision. However, when we look at the existing virtual world in detail, they are all using similar avatar movement and isometric perspective. These parts of implementation actually can be reused in different virtual world projects. We can boost up the development speed by applying some environment and movement engines to the project.

OpenSpace (http://www.openspace-engine.com/) is an isometric engine that's developed by the same company of SmartFoxServer and can fully be integrated into it.

OpenSpace comes with all basic features that an isometric engine should have such as view port panning, zooming, and 8-direction avatar's movement. Besides the basic features, there are several advanced features from this engine.

Editing with advanced map editor

The OpenSpace...