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

Introducing path finding


Path finding is the method to find a path between two points in the world. It determines how the avatar moves around the virtual world. There are many different approaches that result differently. Some perform faster while some guarantee a best shortest path. We will discuss how to choose a good path finding method to fit the virtual world design.

Sometimes, finding the direct way from the start point to goal point is possible and trivial. But it can be blocked by non-walkable barrier.

Instead, we may explore all tiles until we find the goal. Then we have shortest path according to the result that was found.

This method seems to work but it may result in poor performance because it explored almost all tiles on the map to find the result.

Walking is one of the most frequent actions in a virtual world. And it requires path finding for every movement. As in the previous example, path finding is an action that can consume quite a lot of CPU resource if not properly used...