Hey all,

If one wanted to recreate a game like farmville, what technologies would they need to learn?

I believe farmville is in flash, is it actionscript 2 or actionscript 3? I'm also pretty sure they have their GUI system in CSS. What about the backend? PHP and MySQL? Do they even have any client side javascript or is all of the logic handled on their servers?

Thanks for the help!

It doesn't matter, I'm not that familiar with farmville but i assume its one of those multiplayer:ish community based web games that are so popular these days, For any such game you basically need 2-3 things:

1) Something to use for the client, (Flash is the most popular choice for 2D web games, but Javascript/HTML/CSS works aswell, For 3D games something like Unity or Java will be a better choice)
2) Something to use for the server (This varies greatly, Java, Python, C# or JavaScript (using node.js) are common choices for games that require persistent connections and a server pushing updates to the game, PHP and ASP.Net only really work well if you can afford to have the client do the pushing and pulling of updates, it will allow you to use a cheaper webhost for the server though and it can be slightly easier to develop a game this way, especially if you come from a web background.
3) (Depending on the game), Some form of system to store all the player data, a database such as MySQL is a common and fairly simple solution.

As a rule of thumb you want to handle anything which is important on the server, The player has full control of what the client does and as such the client can never be trusted. (This not only means that you have to deal with clients trying to cheat, it also means that you need to deal with clients sending you data that is designed to crash your server or cause it to run code written by the hacker)

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1317357299' post='4867466']
[quote name='Darkbouncer4689' timestamp='1317353003' post='4867447']
Hey all,

If one wanted to recreate a game like farmville, what technologies would they need to learn?

I believe farmville is in flash, is it actionscript 2 or actionscript 3? I'm also pretty sure they have their GUI system in CSS. What about the backend? PHP and MySQL? Do they even have any client side javascript or is all of the logic handled on their servers?

Thanks for the help!

It doesn't matter, I'm not that familiar with farmville but i assume its one of those multiplayer:ish community based web games that are so popular these days, For any such game you basically need 2-3 things:

1) Something to use for the client, (Flash is the most popular choice for 2D web games, but Javascript/HTML/CSS works aswell, For 3D games something like Unity or Java will be a better choice)
2) Something to use for the server (This varies greatly, Java, Python, C# or JavaScript (using node.js) are common choices for games that require persistent connections and a server pushing updates to the game, PHP and ASP.Net only really work well if you can afford to have the client do the pushing and pulling of updates, it will allow you to use a cheaper webhost for the server though and it can be slightly easier to develop a game this way, especially if you come from a web background.
3) (Depending on the game), Some form of system to store all the player data, a database such as MySQL is a common and fairly simple solution.

As a rule of thumb you want to handle anything which is important on the server, The player has full control of what the client does and as such the client can never be trusted. (This not only means that you have to deal with clients trying to cheat, it also means that you need to deal with clients sending you data that is designed to crash your server or cause it to run code written by the hacker)
[/quote]

Interesting... web content is so annoying >_> Thanks for the help!

Also, do these games use Actionscript 2 or Actionscript 3?
[/quote]

It really depends on when the game was made, AS3 has a few extra features that make developing easier and if used properly can improve performance so there is little reason to use AS2 these days, In general it is impossible for the user to tell which version of the language was used.

i like to do cross-platform Flash building / production. are there shareware tools for this ?

I'm going to provide a brief answer because this is vaguely related to the topic in question, but in future please start your own topic if you want to ask a question that isn't directly related to the topic being discussed. You can use FlashDevelop and/or haXe to target the Flash platform for free.

Additionally, please stop quoting the entire post you are responding to every time you post -- some of them are quite large, and in many cases they aren't necessary -- only include a quote if it might be unclear which post you are responding to or if you need to respond to a specific small segment of a post. I've just been through removing large and unneeded quotes from a number of your replies.