Chapter 1. Developing Flash Virtual World

Online game community has been popular for years. Recently many virtual worlds are Flash-based and can run directly in web browser. The latest Flash player 10 and ActionScript 3 gain a performance leap from older Flash player and ActionScript 2. The memory consumption is around 50 percent more and the script performance is around 10 times faster than ActionScript 2.

Thanks to the performance enhancement and the binary socket connectivity support of the latest ActionScript, building Flash virtual world is possible for even independent Flash developers.

In this chapter, we will discuss the benefit of developing Flash virtual world. We will also discuss different connection methods between Flash clients and compare different server solutions.