Existing virtual world games
There are several existing virtual worlds running successfully. Some of them are Flash-based and some are not. We will introduce them here so that we can give them a try and get some inspiration before starting our virtual world design and development.
Club Penguin
Club penguin (http://www.clubpenguin.com/) is a successful story of Flash multiplayer virtual world with SmartFoxServer as backend. It is a kind of casual game virtual world where players explore in a small town and play multiplayer mini games with each other. It can be a good example of what Flash with socket server can do.
Mole
Mole (http://www.51mole.com/) is one of the largest Flash online virtual worlds in China now. It is a casual virtual world game in which players play mini games and some casual quests inside the world. It targets children whose age ranges from 6 to 14. According to a 2010 document, the mole virtual world has a record of 450K peak concurrent players.
Dofus
Dofus (http://www.dofus.com/) is a Flash massive multiplayer online role playing game developed by Ankama from France. Players play against monsters in the virtual world to gain experiences to level up and earn points to buy equipment. Dofus in one of the most successful Flash virtual worlds and has 30 million registered players and 250K peak concurrent connections in 2010.
World of Warcraft
As one of the best-selling virtual world communities, it is worth taking a trial at this game. World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/), also referred as WoW, is a kind of serious game play virtual world that contains a huge worldview and complicated story.
Club Penguin, Mole, and Dofus are Flash virtual worlds but World of Warcraft is not. It is developed in LUA, a scripting language, and C++. WoW is a very huge 3D virtual world that contains over 7000 quests and 40,000 non-player characters. The 3D environment with large graphic assets exceeds the limit that Flash player can handle. According to a document from Blizzard, the company behind WoW, in 2009, the World of Warcraft ran on over 13,000 server instances.
