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

Putting our virtual world in mobile


Mobile gaming is a big trend recently. Adobe has been working on putting full feature Flash player into mobile devices. Smartphone that runs android can use the Flash player 10.1. This makes it possible to extend our virtual world into any android mobile device. However, usually we cannot give users a good experience by directly playing the Flash games in mobile phone without any optimization. There are several limitations that we need to consider for running Flash in mobile devices.

Small screen size

The screen size of the mobile devices is usually very small compared to the desktop. It may range from 480x320 to 800x600. We cannot simply scale down everything to fit the screen size. All elements should be of a reasonable size so that they are recognizeable and can be touched. If the buttons are so small that the players can't touch them correctly, it will be useless.

Low RAM

RAM in mobile devices is often very low. We need to make sure we do not allocate...