Yeah, a Flash section. I like Flash as it provides interactive web-contents easily. I've been doing some Flash since Flash 5, so I'm a bit experienced with it.

My wife (especially) and I are involved in a small but quite active Internet community. In the past, I wrote some web-chat software targeted at this community, especially a small Flash-based chat, and later a Java applet, but none of them were much used.

Some weeks ago, while performing some sites updates, my wife and I were discussing about bringing some kind of chat system back to life.
But we did not want to re-use one the previous ones, as they were not succesful. Instead, we had the idea to make something more entertaining, like this one where you control a small character (here, a penguin) in some scenes, and are offered some basic interaction (walking through some rooms, throwing snowballs, etc).

So I started something similar, with a single room and some characters moving along, in "non-connected" mode (I'll talk about that later). Well, nothing fancy... But then I added some rooms, switched to a "connected" mode, and then added what brought success to that small piece of software : some coins to collect.

People started to compete to be the richest person in the chat (yeah, much like in real life). Because of this success, the small chat program became a small online RPG engine in Flash, with the following features :

• Online chat, with everyone impersonated as a character.
• Maps connected to each others, bringing a quite large world to explore.
• Shops where you can buy and sell items.
• Spells you can cast, to improve your character's skills or use on other characters (the most funny part :)).
• Your money/items are kept from one chat session to the other.
• Event system bringing new items to the "world" (coins, treasures, special items...)

From a technical point of view, here are the features :

• Flash application on the browser side, using XMLSockets to communicate with the server.
• Server written in Java.
• Maps dynamically loaded from the web server.
• Collision and objects maps stored in text files.
• Items and characters data stored in a MySQL database.

It is now in a quite "mature" state, so I plan to do some things with it :

• Make an English translation (the current version is in French only).
• Set up a public server, for people that want to try it.

The whole system was designed for a rather private audience. Before releasing it in a much larger audience, I need to ensure that it does not subject to copyright-related issues (to be honest, as it was only for private use, the current version has some issues of that kind).

• Later, release the source, once it is cleaned up a bit, and if it useful for anyone.

Enough said for the moment, here are some screenshots, to keep you waiting :)