Customer Reviews

ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I was very excited about this book when I read about it here on Amazon and read others reviews, but was very sadly disappointed by the content of this book when it finally arrived. First, it's very small - much smaller than any other book worth reading on Actionscript. Second, it boils down to little more than a promotional piece for ElectroServer - the commercial game server written by the company started by the author. It lacks any clear examples, and frankly has more 'this topic is too complex to be covered in this book' statements than any other book I've ever read... ever. The examples given are disjointed - I've not seen a single actual class in the whole book - just insignificant bits and pieces of code that don't go together. Lots of examples show just a tiny fraction of the whole class and leave you either having to dig through a download of content that should have been included with the book for the amount of money they charged for this fireplace starter, or imagine it for yourself. Very poorly written, very poorly done and very disappointing to someone hoping to learn more about developing better multiplayer content - but even for a seasoned professional this book is a hard read. Spare your nickel and give it to any other author who writes books to help others learn through working examples instead of shameless self promotion of commercial products through manuscript. I find the whole thing to be very distasteful to be honest about it and will not buy another book from this author ever again.

I'm really motivated to add the concepts in the book to my Actionscript arsenal, so I was excited for the arrival of this book and diving in. The book is an excellent crash course in multi-player game theory and fills a much-needed place in the AS book market.

The book fails, however, when it comes to the examples. While carefully avoiding the need to own Flash or Flex to complete the exercises and thereby lowering the barrier to entry, the author requires a free 3rd-party AS editor, Flash Develop, which doesn't have a Mac client. So Mac users, beware, this oversight throws up a road block right away.

The author says the projects can be imported into Flex Builder, but I haven't gotten this to work yet. Some projects require the fl.controls class which isn't native to the Flex SDK, so there's another road block. I'm still working on this one.

I did get a few examples to run from the Flash IDE, by creating an FLA and assigning the Main.as class as its document class. This wasn't without headache: you have to go into several of the example classes and adjust paths to get the classes to import. Not for the faint of heart.

A simple solution would be to include versions of the examples in the book's downloadable files that would easily import into Flex Builder or Flash. What AS developer doesn't own one of these? Be prepared to do a lot of forensics to get the examples to work. Disappointing. (Note to PeachPit: you could still do this!)

The upside: ElectroServer, the socket server that the entire book is based on, installs easily on a Mac.

This book was written wholly for the purpose of selling their server. It doesn't delve into anything helpful considering action scripts other then basic game design theory. (which some of the theory is good, most definitely NOT WORTH THE $).

The demand for mutliplayer games and virutal worlds has exploded over the last few years. Companies want them for site stickiness through social networking, and developers have tremendous interest in exploring this niche area.

I have dabbled in Flash development for a number of years now, and although I have tried to create a few simple Flash games, I always find it difficult to get resources or guides on how to do certain things (even best practices).

This book isnt a step-by-step guide on ActionScript 3.0, there are lots of books on that. This book is specifically on how to take your Flash skills to the next level and full understand how 'real' game development works and what is expected of you in the workplace.

This book is like taking the expertise of existing game developers and putting it all in one easy-to-read book.

Some of the very important topics covereed in this book are:

1. how to connect users for 'real-time' interaction
2. techniques for time synchronization
3. techniques for customizing and redering avatars in virtual world
4. when to make decisions on coding techniques on server or client

And of course, what book would be without some real-examples to show the reader. That in itself is worth the price of the book. The author has a couple fully-developed games that he goes through in the book (virtual world, co-op and tank game) and uses as the guide in his explanations. That alone helped me understand so many things I couldnt find anywhere else.

A great book and the only of its kind on the market today. Pick it up!

This is an excellent book on building multiplayer games with ActionScript 3. It provides insightful theory on game building and synchronisation techniques. Coming from distributed systems background, I particularly enjoyed the section on latency hiding, and the implication of security concerns in multiplayer games.

The theories in this book were put into practice with examples. A good attempt is made to make these examples accessible without the expensive Flash IDE. However, I agree with another reviewer that a Flash version should be provided. Having said that, I found the free Flash examples/tutorials on EsWiki work (http://es-wiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page) well with this book.

ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds by Jobe Makar is a book about developing real-time multiplayer games. There are plenty of Flash based games in the Internet but there is not much information available on real-time movement techniques, latency hiding, predictive movement, maintaining game state and logic, pathfinding, messaging, authority and prediction, isometric view, avatars and creating virtual worlds, etc. All of these you can find in the ActionScript for Multiplayer Games book.

This book is a very valuable resource for ActionScript developers and architects wanting to develop real-time multiplayer games. The book is based on ElectroServer Java socket-server on the server-side and Adobe Flash/ActionScript technology on the client-side. The ElectroServer can be easily installed and configured. The author builds user's confidence and experince in multiplayer game techniques explaining them step by step from easiest to more sophisticated ones. The book is full of awesome examples which can be easily run in FlashDevelop or (after writing a few additional lines of code) in Flex/Flash Builder.

Reading this book, I have been learning about many general issues which have to be considered during a game development process. It helped me to get started with my own project without much wandering about and wasting my time (and money). The examples helped me to understand practical aspects of many development techniques. The book is written using easy to undestand, plain English. I recommend this book to any Flash/ActionScript developer new to game development industry. It is worth buying if you like to gain an overall, high level view as well as more detailed and practical skills on developing real-time multiplayer games.

I plan to create Flash based on-line games. This book is very helpful. So I have all info for creating my flash game on Electroserver now. This is not for Flash newbies.

This is a great book. The examples work (simply open in FlashDevelop, a free IDE) and the writing style is clear and concise. I was new to multi-player games and this book was exactly what I was looking for. I highly recommend it.

Multiplayer game development is very difficult to put it nicely. Jobe though has successfully written pretty much the definitive book on this for the Flash Gaming Industry. His examples are easy to understand while describing very difficult concepts.

This book is a must have for any Flash game developer.

I have been wait for this book for almost 2 years now and i must say it is everything i hoped for. Havent completed the book though..but everything seems to be working fine. the chapters are broken down very nicely..and shows you how to think when building virtual worlds with electrotank. I am using flex builder for the projects...and yes though the book doesnt explain how to set up with flex builder...i feel one should already know how to do these things. this is not a beginners book after all....one needs to have experience at least to know how to import fl.controls classes into flex by using swcs. if you are a beginner... "maybe" u might have some difficulity setting up. i highly recommend this book to advanced flash programmers planning to deploy multiuser flash apps