Sharp shooter

After a development delay making my own C.V. website, teaching some programming and doing a short contract. I am currently learning the more in depth workings of the Smartfox Client Server technologies and I have decided to create an initial, smaller, more simple game, to better understand the development process of creating such a large Flash project on my own.

I have based my initial game design on a multi player dog fight, where users log in, enter or create a new game room and then fly around and shoot their opponents. This will make use of some of the core technologies that I will base my time based game on. The games are timed and a user may enter the game at any time during an air battle, similar to the technique used in games such as the multi player, Call of Duty 4. I have used the PureMVC framework to create my overall architecture, Smartfox for the back end comms, I have included database drivers and written custom log in and server side extensions. For the 3D ships, I created a low poly ship in Blender, exported it as a 3D Studio Max model. I then textured it in Paint Shop Pro 7.04.

The server is now communicating positional data to all other users in a given room, this will allow the simple interpolation of positional values since there are no obstacles within this space environment.

The most difficult part up to now has been PureMVCs state machine integration, since I think it has a relativly steep learning curve, however once mastered, it's invaluable. Smartfox is great, but lacks a neat way of handling event objects without wrapping existing SFSEvent objects. This makes it neccessary to know (or learn) the SFSEvent objects' API, since there is no auto completion for this type of object in FlashDevelop.

Overall, creating such an advanced game in Flash is proving to be very enjoyable. I am having fun working on it, I'm learning alot and everything seems to be on track and will, undoubtably, be a great first step to bringing these technologies together for my MMORPG.

I have included a few screen shots of my development process below.



Gary :)