Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds [Paperback]

Makzan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 16, 2010

This is a step-by-step, hands-on guide that is filled with examples and screenshots of building a multiplayer virtual world. The virtual world is built gradually; each chapter in the book sequentially develops the virtual world. The author explains the fundamentals with examples from existing virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Mole, Dofus, and World of Warcraft. If you are a Flash or an ActionScript developer who wants to build powerful and immersive multiplayer games, this book is for you. This book assumes that you have some experience with ActionScript 3.0.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Makzan

Makzan is a game designer working in Macao and Hong Kong, China.

He started as a web designer and met Flash 4 in 2000. He won a bronze medal in WorldSkills for Web Designing and later became the expert of Macao in this competition.

He has interest in creating games and often explores different ways to implement his game ideas such as making Flash games on Wii, mobile games on iPhone, and social games on Facebook.

Since 2003, Makzan started making multiplayer Flash games with different server solutions. He tried most existing multiplayer game solutions until discovering SmartFoxServer.

Product Details

• Paperback: 412 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (August 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1849690367
• ISBN-13: 978-1849690362
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,192,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forget mods: I'm using this book to build my RPG, January 9, 2011

By 

Nicco Wargon - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds (Paperback)

This is a fantastic book that will give you a solid foundation in building isometric Flash MMOs. It makes a great addition for those who already have Jobe Makar's ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds by covering many new topics.

I've been a roleplayer all my life, starting with D&D in the 80s, LARPing in the 90s and internet gaming in the 21st century. My favorite game of all time has to be Neverwinter Nights. I loved it because of the fabulous Aurora toolset it came with that let you create your own virtual world. I spent two months building a "mod" for others to play. And hundreds did. In the end, I got some cheers and jeers and made a few friends. But it always irked me that I would be unable to profit from my creation because the platform I built my game on belonged to someone else. I hoped someone would create an open software system that would allow me to use my own art and build my own worlds.

That brings us to this book. Despite the enormous popularity of Flash social games, there are very few sources that pull back the veil and show step-by-step the code underlying them. This book teaches you how to set up SmartFox Server and create small tiled worlds linked with portals. These zones can then be populated with NPCs who have their own walkpaths and inventories. Character interaction and questing are both covered using dialog trees and keywords. The book also delves into minigames, stores and numerous social features using APIs from Facebook and Twitter. It doesn't cover combat, character stats, gold, spells or crafting, but lets hope the author writes a sequel.

Don't fool yourself into thinking this is going to be easy though. This is high-level Actionscript that will test your coding talent. Also be aware that this book came out a few months before the release of SmartFoxServer 2 which uses Java for server-side scripting. That means the server-side code examples (there are two in the book) may need to be rewritten from ActionScript to Java to work with SFS2.

The book has a few weaknesses. The editors dropped the ball several times with grammar. While the book is well organized, it could have benefited from having chapter checklists. Getting the tutorials up and running is not exactly plug and play. But I have gotten all the way through with 90% of the features intact. The book uses FLAs for content so FlashDevelop users and Adobe Flash Builder 4 owners may need to download Flash Professional trials to use the demo tutorials.

Soon I hope to build my first virtual world. And unlike modding for a game, it will be mine to do with as I will. Thanks, Makzan! And please keep writing!