Abstract:

I saw in a BBS post that someone wanted to make a multiplayer game with CS4 and Flash Player 8. So I decided to tray it out before work and school after Thanksgiving. Never in my life have I wanted to kill myself more just playing and testing around what was SPECIFICALLY Ruffle Compatible but I managed to get it done. Still no sounds though, never figured out how to do that in Flash 8. I basically used Sandy and LoadVars for everything.

Sandy was one of the more earlier 3D frameworks for Flash with their first release (0.1) in 2005. Sandy was first programmed in ActionScript 2 before being ported over to ActionScript 3. The code (exept for version 0.1) uses PixLib events in order to handle events such as adding lighting and rendering. If I recall this was a work around for Flash since Flash natively didn't support multithreading.

For networking I setup a Event loop with LoadVars and used HTTP Polling since Flash 8 also doesn't support sockets and streams since ActionScript 2 doesn't support flash.net.Socket. In fact, the feature came after Flash 9 with the introduction of ActionScript 3.

Controls:

• Username / Password login (no email required)
• WASD to move around the world
• Implemented chat system

Bugs:

• SharedObjects is still not supported in Ruffle, when using variables across the stage you need to use _global
• Ruffle vs. Flash Player and Ruffle Windows port handle POST requests differently. When using an IP instead of a hostname the Windows players work, but Ruffle WASM/JS port fail due to the POST request automatically being upgraded to HTTPS instead of HTTP. At that point your looking at net::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID and wierd net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSE issues. I would recommend getting the server connected and go from there
• Events are still the main issue of concern. According to the compatibility list all versions of Sandy should be supported from 0.1 to 2.x. The main issue once again is how Ruffle handles Events as some events dont appear to be properly executing.

Performance:

TODO: Will post later Im burnt out.

Notes:

This UI layout is shit my bad

Credits:

1. Sandy - Archived Website
2. LoadVars - Documentation

Source Code: https://www.mediafire.com/file/tdpcupfshdn60fw/network.zip/file