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

Chatting with public messages


The most basic communication method in a virtual world is public chat channel. A public message is populated to all players within the same room. The public message mechanism is like people talking loudly in a room. All people can listen and join the conversation. However, when they leave the room, they cannot listen to the conversation anymore. This is exactly how public message behaves in a virtual world.

We are going to make a chat dialog for public chat. The chat is composited by two parties — the sender and the receiver. The sender is a client which speaks the message out loud. The receivers are the clients which are in the same room and listening to the public chat message event. The chat dialog acts as both; the conversation log in the upper half acts as receiver and displays the messages. The lower half allows users to send out messages. This chat dialog is exported as ChatBox ActionScript class and we will implement the behavior with the following code...