Robin is a solution for multiuser technology which saves many of from building a multiuser interfaces from scratch. "Robin, the Flash PHP Multiuser set of classes, runs on XAMPP with a modification to the administration procedure."
Steps to make Robin work:
1) Download XAMPP and start Apache and MySQL
2) Download Robin source file from: http://robinflash.wordpress.com/
3) Put robin folder into C Drive>XAMPP>htdocs
4) Put 'utilities' folder into the appropriate class path folder that you might have set up somewhere else
5) Open Robin.as from utilities folder and type in 'localhost' (line 43)
6) Go back to the robin folder
7) Open mySetup.php and type 'localhost' (line 3)
8) Open Robin.php and comment out line 33
9) Publish your fla file with html page
10) Start robin by browsing to: http://localhost/robin.robin.php
11) Browse to your html page in a different window
By following these steps, I was able to install this this technology into my computer and was able to then start creating my own working sample. Robin was useful to build the game I intended to build.
Game:
Since it is holiday time, I through of creating a game based on Christmas theme. And the game is: When each user enter to play this game, each of them get a unique avatar that is generated totally in a random manner. Then they have to collect as many stars as they can from the tree and it will create competition between users.
I had one tough time during the creation of this game: I had trouble getting the hitTest work on the multiuser interface for when the avatar hit the stars and those stars disappear. Except that small glitch, everything else worked out fine in terms of how I wanted it to work.
Improvement: For the future, I would make the hitTest appear for all users in the game and also add a counter that would keep track of stars that each users have collected.
Source file to download: http://robinflash.wordpress.com/
