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

Sending private messages


A common use of buddy list is sending private messages to buddies. In some cases, we may be playing a game in virtual world and want to ask whether my friend wants to join it. We can open up the buddy list within the game and send a private message out. We are going to implement it by using the built-in private message feature.

We added a private message button in the info panel. A private message panel prompts out when we click on the button. After the player inputs some text and clicks on send, we construct the private message in a format to include the recipient's name. We need the recipient's name to display in the chat dialog panel. The chat message is composed in following format:

Sender|recipient|private message

The following code in PrivateMessagePanel.as sends out the private message. We need to check if the recipient is from current room or buddy list in order to get the recipient's user ID.

private function clickSendBtn(e:MouseEvent):void {
var targetBuddyId...