Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Development environment
To develop a lash-based multiplayer game as discussed in this topic, the following
are necessary:
• Flash AS3 development Environment, such as Eclipse, Flash Builder 4,
or Flash Develop
• Pulse SDK
In this topic, we will use Adobe Flash Developer 4 to manage our game project and
to write all the code. However, you may very well use any other IDEs that you are
familiar with.
In order to aid us in learning to develop multiplayer games in a relatively short
amount of time, we will make use of Pulse SDK throughout this topic.
Pulse SDK
Pulse SDK is a commercial middleware product developed by Gamantra that helps
speed up the development of a multiplayer game. It offers an innovative API that does
not require any server-side programming and offers, among other features, room and
lobby management, high scores, in-game registration, chat, and persistence. It allows
game developers to work at higher levels, focusing on game implementation rather
than working at lower-level networking and server implementation.
Pulse includes a generic server on which you can write a wide variety of multiplayer
games. It is the aim of Pulse to simplify the multiplayer game development, and
for this reason, we don't deal with the server-side programming. However, for the
development of more sophisticated games such as MMORPG and virtual world
implementation, which require server-side logic, the versions of Pulse that offer
server-side SDK would be more suited. These are not discussed in this topic.
Pulse SDK does not offer any additional low-level graphics libraries on top of Flash.
However, it does offer a high-level networking API and a generic server. It includes
a simple game screen management component, which is ideal for rapid prototyping
of Flash-based multiplayer game. The Pulse SDK is a simple yet powerful developer
API that integrates with a powerful Pulse deployment platform.
