Isolinear Chips

This project aims to be the complete network protocol specification for the game Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator. This is a completely unofficial work, made by fans of the game, spending countless hours reverse engineering the network protocol.

Specification format

The protocol is specified in the [Simple Type Format] (https://github.com/chrivers/transwarp) (.stf) format. The format is quite easy for humans to read, but is a machine-parsable format!

Having a machine-readable protocol specification, makes it possible to generate protocol parsers (for multiple programming langauges), analysis tools, and reference documentation, from the same data source. This prevents the various protocol-related works from drifting out of spec, leading to incompatabilities and hard-to-find bugs.

Organization

Currently, the .stf files are organized as follows:

client.stf       ClientPacket specification
enums.stf        Enums and bitflags
objects.stf      Game object (with bitmask lengths)
parser.stf       Client/server parser tree
server.stf       ServerPacket specification
structs.stf      Structs used by Client/ServerPacket

Getting started

To use this specification as more than a textual reference, you need a .stf compiler. Right now, the only existing compiler is [Transwarp] (https://github.com/chrivers/transwarp): https://github.com/chrivers/transwarp.

Using Transwarp, you can generate HTML documentation, ascii reference tables, programming language headers, or anything you might need. All you need, is to make a template file, that uses this data structure

Contributors

The protocol specification in this repository, is based of the collaborative work of the protocol-docs project, spearheaded by Robert J. Walker. The conversion into .stf format was done by Christian Iversen.

Etymology

In the Star Trek universe, Isolinear Chips are advanced data storage devices, that contain large amounts of data.