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

Displaying items in different forms


There are different appearances of items. Players can put items in hands. When they put items in hands, the items can be visually displayed in the hands of the avatars. These require more graphic work. We need to draw several graphics of the avatar mounting the items for each direction. It is four or eight directions for each item; we may have thousands of items and they may even have their own animations.

Therefore, instead of drawing all animation for all items, some low-budget virtual world projects choose to draw only animations of important items. For the other items, they may not even display them on the avatar's graphics.

Some virtual worlds illustrate the items as cards. They add the game play elements of card games into the item's system of the virtual world. The card system can be helpful for players to read different information of the item easily. For example, in the following card inventory panel (http://www.spgame.com/), the cards with gold...