The textual output of TradeWars is great for humans, but not so great for helpers and scripts. As part of a bigger effort to look at how to make TradeWars more attractive to the casual player, I needed to write a client, and having been there and done that, my efforts always stall on the monumental task of parsing the textual output of TWGS. To get around that this time, I came up with a new protocol that allows a client and server to embed structured data within the telnet stream, and have implemented it in TWX Proxy.

The protocol is called the Hidden In Plain Sight (HIPS) protocol and utilizes telnet negotiation and ANSI codes to embed structured data (JSON specifically) in the text stream as a way for the server and client to communicate easily without disrupting the game. I've outlined the design in the HIPS Protocol Specification, and intrepid coders can check out the implementation in the TWX Proxy source code (see the Developers Guide for more information).

I believe this protocol will make implementing your own helper significantly easier, especially if you use TWX Proxy to handle the data parsing and scripting. I'd like to see this protocol not be tied just to TWX Proxy, perhaps one day, it could even be implemented in TWGS directly, opening up the game for all sorts of interesting innovations. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

very interesting, however there is one fly in the ointment. other legacy helpers that connect to twx, e.g. swath, would have to filter out all the hips messages that get in the way of their own parsing of the game text and ansi codes. not a big deal, i suppose, but then again i'm not a helper author, yet.

That's not a problem, since the telnet option negotiation ensures that only clients that support HIPS will receive HIPS messages. TWX Proxy will continue to work with Zoc, Swath, or whatever out of the box. Only clients that respond to the HIPS negotiation correctly will trigger them in TWX Proxy.

My personal use case is ElderProphet and I are exploring running TWXProxy on the server with a board-provided client, so in order to develop the client, I want to leverage TWXProxy for data parsing and script execution, leaving me able to focus on the user interface. For end users, HIPS doesn't mean anything, but for those that want to write a helper or higher-level scripts building on TWX Proxy, HIPS makes their job much easier. Sure, I'd love to get JP to add support in TWGS, but right, I doubt that would ever happen.