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

Sharing object data between players


We have discussed how to communicate with text messages. In many cases, we need to share some pieces of information with other players. For example, we want to update others with our location. In previous chapters, we used serialization and deserialization methods to put information inside the private and public messages in some special format. This is a useful method where we can only send out and receive text messages.

Recently the SmartFoxServer introduced the sendObject and sendObjectToGroup functions to broadcast data object to all players or specific players. The data communication flow of the two methods is basically the same. The difference is public message serializes all data into strings and sendObject does not. We do not need to deserialize the strings back to complex objects and arrays when receiving it.

Making the trading items system

With the sendObjectToGroup function, we can share data between specific players. It is useful to implement...