   basic flash MMo questions
  Hi guys.I have games/activities built in flash to teach kids English. We want to move them to the web which is easy BUT I want to build an web where people can chat and interact their avatars. ie: Very basic stuff. You chat to other players and then you play games on you own.1. Can the avatars be my simple flash characters. 30 avatars running around the screen talking to each other is OK isn't it.2. I have seen some really technical posts on here - I take it thats for more intense head to head gaming which is not my case.Someone has mentioned smartfox - Aer me and my programmer in for rollercoaster ride of headaches or is my setup extrmeñy simple.   
  First, a word of caution: If you and your team does not have experience with real-time interactive distributed systems, you are in for heart-ache, no matter what! It's a very different world from "regular" software, but it looks almost the same from the outside, leading to all kinds of broken plans.Second, a word of encouragement: Yes, it is possible to build. For someone who has the appropriate experience, it's not even that hard, although it will take time and resources.I guess my main piece of advice here is that there are lots of things that need to be considered for a system to actually work, besides just walking and chatting. For example:- how do rooms get created?- how do people get placed into a room?- how do you identify specific users?- is there persistent state tied to a user?- how do you deal with griefers? (yes, you need to design that in from the beginning)- how available does the system need to be?- how big does it need to be?- what if it grows to five times your estimated size, could you keep up?- what if it grows to one-fifth the planned size, do you have too high overhead?;  Hi, thanks for the reply.My biggest question is really:1. What course/tutorial is out there to do this properly.2. Smartfox seems to handle most things you have talked about and in a quite easy way (well it looked easy enough although I know nothing about sockets).3. Avatar: do I just build little avatars in flash   ;Quote:1. What course/tutorial is out there to do this properly."The school of hard knocks." It helps to have a master's degree in comp sci, ideally with a focus on distributed systems and telecom/networking.Quote:2. Smartfox seems to make this easyIf you believe that Smartfox will solve your problems (especially for a single group of 30, that may very well be true), I highly recommend you use it!Quote:3. Do I build flash avatars?That depends. Do you want flash avatars? What are your options? What do you need to do? What's your budget?What's concerning to me is that you're asking a bunch of question that have more to do with knowing how to organize any project, rather than networking in specific. If you don't know much about organizing/running a real development project, AND you don't know much about networking, then you're up against two problems at the same time.There's nothing saying you can't do what you want -- you may very well succeed. However, the "vibes" that I read from your questions are the same kind of "vibes" that I've seen in the beginning of other projects before, where those projects have usually gone awry. The point is that you need to reduce your risks. If you're doing something technically risky (multiplayer networking, say), then it helps a lot of you have a lot of experienced project management skills for risk management. If you don't have a lot of experienced project management, then it helps a lot if you know very well what you're doing (say, you're re-implementing something you've done twice before, together with colleageues from the same background). However, if you have neither, then the weaknesses in one of the risks will seriously jeopardize the outcome because the other risk makes it less likely that you'll find trouble early enough to fix it.However that may be, there's only one way to find out: go do it! I wish you the best of luck, and if it goes well or poorly, please come back and let us know how your choices turned out!