This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

The demand for multiplayer games and virtual worlds has exploded over the last few years. Not only do companies want them for site stickiness through social networking, but developers have tremendous interest in exploring this niche area. While developing multiplayer content is challenging, it isn’t as difficult as you might think, and it is fun and highly rewarding!

ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds explains fundamental multiplayer concepts from connecting to a server to real-time latency hiding techniques. In this book you’ll learn:

• How to connect users to achieve real-time interaction

• When to make decisions on the server versus the game client

• Time synchronization techniques

• How to use dead reckoning smoothing to hide network latency

• About tile-based games the isometric view

• Techniques for customizing and rendering avatars in a virtual world

In addition, you’ll learn everything that goes into building:

• A real-time multiplayer tank battle game

• A real-time multilayer cooperative game

• A virtual world

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 2 Ratings

Big on ideas, fails on examples - 2009-09-08
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Been waiting long for this book - 2009-09-10
Reviewer Rating:
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

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