real-time multiplayer flash

[yuppio]

Hello!

My friend and I are now thinking about new browser based RPG with lots of interesting stuff.

One thing we were considering was using the real-time multi-player option which is provided by Flash and flash xml server.

I found few open source flash servers - red5,  Palabre. Palabre looks good because it is written in python, which I think is easier for me to try to learn and understand. Red5 is written in java.

Why there are only a few games which use real-time flash abilities. Is it so hard to develop or there are some other technological  issues to make smooth real-time flash.

Also when I google information about flash xml servers, their performance and use of it in real life - really small amount of discussions / information. Why is that?

My idea was to make movement around the map and/or battles in real-time, using flash. When I last time used flash, the latest version was Flash 5 Also Python is new language for me. But I am full of determination to study

[Chris]

What "flash xml server" is? Never heard of it...

[yuppio]

Actually few weeks ago I also didn't know about it. It is like simple socket server, which is using xml for data exchange. This socket server can be written even in php5 (some examples can be found on google), but it's not a good idea for sure PHP is not made for that kind of stuff.

Users connect to server using flash client and make persistent connection. When someone does some action, then server sends out data about that action to all clients connected.

The most simple usage of it is chat. Users connect to socket server using chat client written in flash (actually it is quite easy code), listening to socket server, when message is posted, server sends out the data to all clients and they print out message.

Palabre has great DEMO:
http://palabre.gavroche.net/cars/

There's chat and also you can play multi-player car game.

Well I'm sure about using this server for chat feature in my game, but not sure about using it for something more interesting as live user interaction.

I think this type of chat beats any ajax chat.