Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Introduction to FlashBuilder
and AS3
Installing Flash Builder 4
What you need to start out is to get yourself the trial version from the Adobe site
at
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashbuilder/
. That's pretty much all you
need to start writing your games. In order to write multiplayer games, we will also
need a server that allows the exchange of information between players. For this, we
will use the Pulse SDK framework. The Pulse SDK not only includes the server that
connects all players within a game instance, but also offers all the standard feature
set required by any multi-player game, such as friends, chat, sharing of game state
information among players and further helps us manage the lobby and rooms.
AS2 versus AS3
If you are already a long-time Flash developer working with AS2, this chapter
is great to get your feet wet in AS3 programming. We will go through the AS3
syntax that enables us to write structured code by the use of classes and inheritance
techniques. These concepts may seem like an overhead, but will make our
programming task much easier, allowing us to create large, complex projects with
ease. Also, programming in an object-oriented way lets us reuse the code. No, copy
and paste is not one of them! My simple suggestion is not to try and seek all the
advantages of an object-oriented design and programming from day one. It does
take some practice and working with a few projects to realize that you are doing
something similar to what you did in another project, and you will automatically
start building your own set of classes that you can reuse in all your future projects.
