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

Making an isometric map


Isometric map means the graphics of the ground of the virtual world.

There are several techniques to make the graphics of the isometric map in Flash.

Creating the base tile of an isometric map

It will be convenient to draw a base grid with isometric perspective and this will be a reference of all other isometric graphics.

  1. 1. Draw a square.

  2. 2. Rotate the rectangle right by 45 degrees.

  3. 3. Open the Transform panel in Flash by choosing Window | Transform.

  4. 4. Set the Scale Height value from 100% to 50%.

  5. 5. Draw the inner lines.

After drawing the basic grid, we can resize the grid to a specific width and height. This dimension can be treated as the basic unit of the whole isometric map.

For example, we will use 48 pixels width and 24 pixels height here.

To make it easier for further use, we will make this isometric shape as a movie clip symbol and name it IsoTile.

Furthermore, we need to modify the IsoTile movie clip so that the original point is placed in the (0, height/2) point...