H5NET is designed to work in any transport layer that is capable of handling packet payloads of up to 400 bytes, with any amount of packet loss and connection instability. As such, it performs no verification of player identity, but it is fairly trivial to extend it to do such a thing. It should be impossible to write a compliant, sane packet that exceeds 400 ASCII characters/bytes in length, however there is plenty of room to expand until the more realistic 1000+ bytes that most protocols can handle, which leaves rooms for extensions to touch this specification.
It is recommended to use the “.h5net” extension for H5NET documents (where applicable). H5NET is identified by the MIME type text/x-h5net
When querying the node that is acting as the server or ‘MASTER’, the following format should be followed:
_USER
id (identification) ...
_DATA
exten (ext)
_DATA_(id)
thrusters (thru1) (thru2) (buttons)
_QUERY
mode (mode)Where (identification) is the desired player number(s) to control, however the client node may not request more than 4.
Where (ext) is the extension the client wants to use. The client should be prepared to roll back to basic ‘Halfive’ if the server does not reply in the expected format of the extension.
Where (thru1) is the value of the left thruster axis, (unsigned, 8-bit)
Where (thru2) is the value of the right thruster axis (unsigned, 8-bit)
Where (buttons) is a bitmask holding the state of eight buttons (unsigned, 8-bit)
Where (mode) is one of the letters described below
r - RACE INFORMATION l - LEADERBOARD INFORMATION
The server should reply to the IP address (or closest equivalent at the implementation’s discretion, in case the protocol used is not IP) following this template:
_DATA
track (trackname)
game (gamemode)
ext (extension)
1 (pos1) (pos2) (t1) (t2) (t3)
2 (pos1) (pos2) (t1) (t2) (t3)
3 (pos1) (pos2) (t1) (t2) (t3)
4 (pos1) (pos2) (t1) (t2) (t3)
6 (pos1) (pos2) (t1) (t2) (t3)
7 (pos1) (pos2) (t1) (t2) (t3)
8 (pos1) (pos2) (t1) (t2) (t3)Where (trackname) is an eight character alphanumerical string that represents the track being used.
Where (gamemode) is an eight character alphanumerical string that represents the gamemode being used. To indicate a normal race mode, it should be “_DEFAULT”
Where (pos1) and (pos2) are a the x and y of the player’s position (unsigned, 32-bit, origin (0,0)), and t1-3 are the flags described below.
Note these flags are abstract and meant to give the client context, as opposed to any kind of computationally-specific indications. If the flag ‘r’ is received as the client packet mode, race type 1, race type 2, and race type 3 flags shall be supplied. If the flag ‘l’ is received, the leaderboard information should be supplied at (t1) flag, and the other two types should not be included.
r - RACE
l - LEADERBOARD
- TYPE 1 - VEHICLE STATES -
o - OFFTRACK
u - DRIFT
x - HURT
s - SLOWER
z - FASTER
e - ELECTRIFIED
c - CRASHED
y - NONE
- TYPE 2 - MOVEMENT STATES -
f - FORWARDS
b - BACKWARDS
k - STARTUP
i - STOPPED
- TYPE 3 - CONNECTION STATES -
a - CONNECTED
m - MULTIPLEX
t - TIMEOUT
h - PAUSE(1..8) - POSITION