ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds Book Overview 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

Based on the design, I found that Flash CS4’s Slider component is too thin — it needs to be thicker, i.e. I have to change the Slider’s height. I checked the API docs, and there’s nothing for setting the SliderTrackSkin’s height. Looks like I’ll have to dig into the UI components myself. Exploration… Result: In Flash CS4, the UI component files are under [X:\**]\Adobe Flash CS4\Common\Configuration\Components, and the source files are under [X:\**]\Adobe Flash CS4\Common\Configuration\Component Source\ActionScript 3.0\User Interface

The following content is reposted from http://www.eoocy.com/article.asp?id=3 Below are some extremely useful libraries — I was overjoyed when I found them. APIs, Libs, Components as3ebaylib http://code.google.com/p/as3ebaylib/ as3youtubelib http://code.google.com/p/as3youtubelib/

StandingWave is an AS3 code library designed for high level control of Flash Player 10’s SampleDataEvent API for streaming audio output. It is based on a subset of the audio engine used by the Noteflight Score Editor. The goal of StandingWave is to encapsulate the following kinds of objects, permitting them to be easily chained together and combined to produce complex, dynamic audio output:

HTML 5 is the next generation of the Hypertext Markup Language. Since HTML 4 was released in 1997, HTML development had been at a standstill, while the Web has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years — so much so that HTML 4 can no longer keep up with today’s increasingly “rich” Web applications. HTML 5 not only addresses HTML 4’s functional shortcomings for Web applications, it also aims to improve HTML’s interactive capabilities and support today’s diverse, complex Web content.

Recently, Adobe published the RTMP protocol specification: Official page: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/rtmp/ Download link: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/rtmp/pdf/rtmp_specification_1.0.pdf

ZipArchive is a Zip archive handling class that can read and write various zip format files. ZipArchive (Google Code) Online API

AS3GIF lets Flash play animated GIF files, and implements GIF encoding in ActionScript 3. Introduction as3gif download (Google Code) Bookmarking it here for easy lookup.

Last time I posted a Flash debug tool, Arthropod. Now here’s an addition — one of the most feature-packed, most usable Flash Debug tools: De MonsterDebugger. Right now Huoshan is using this debug tool.

Arthropod is a Flash debug tool. Its main feature: developers just need to call its Debug.log(“×××”); method to write relevant logs for easier debugging. The author is currently busy working on version 2.0. The new version will have an improved UI and some new features, making it more usable. The author plans to make Arthropod the undisputed choice for a Flash debugger.