Multi-Room game design questions

[thurinus]

Hey all,

I'm currently well underway building a multiuser RP environment (I'd have reservations calling it an MMO for now), and would like to solicit some advice from the Flash software architecture gurus around here

The game, as designed, is similar to the likes of Monkey Island or King's Quest, where a user would traverse an expansive world by entering and exiting static 'scenes', as opposed to scrolling like Super Mario. As implemented right now, I have an SWF for each 'scene', each being loaded using a Loader object into the game shell dynamically as the user enters the scene.

Each scene is compiled with a .FLA file that holds a library of game widgets, and a generic GameScene class which does some initializing work and performs depth management for the widgets and characters in the scene. However, it is the shell that adds and removes characters in the scene movieclip as they enter and leave the scene in the socket server, utilizing the GameScene public functions 'addGameObject' and 'removeGameObject' to do so (as opposed to simply calling addChild and removeChild on the Loader content).

I have a few questions regarding this architecture... the most generic and possibly important one is:

Is this the right approach for this sort of project? In my opinion it feels a tad messy calling functions from a loaded SWF file, forcing dependencies between otherwise unrelated clips. But is there another, cleaner way, while avoiding having to compile the game into one massive SWF file?

Other related questions are:

For such a game, where would you place NPC's (non-player characters)? Would you have them reside within the Scene SWF's, or dynamically added to the Scene movieclip once it has been loaded by the Loader object?

Current Flash games that implement this game paradigm include... the ubiquitous Club Penguin, and Dofus, to name 2 of the best I know among many. Is there anyone here who has developed similar games (or hell, even those games themselves!) who can offer insight to good architecture practices?

Thanks for any and all help folks!
Jay