Protocol documentation/question. about neolink HOT 3 OPEN

Not yet - and I can totally understand how you'd have trouble reading the Rust, the Baichuan parser is really nasty - I don't like how the Nom parser works in practice.

At a high level the core packet format is:

• header
• body
• extension data

The header is pretty easy. Magic bytes, message ID number, message length, and a couple of fields that aren't really used as far as I can tell.

Almost all messages are "modern" messages which have XML bodies, obfuscated by the Charlie Scrambler. There is one top-level XML tag per message ID number; you just have to know these. In Neolink, the message ID number is how messages are routed from the socket to the appropriate thread - which then matches against the deserialized structure.

The extension data is, depending on the message, possibly absent, binary data (video data stream chunked into 40KB packets), or more obfuscated XML. The presence of extension data is stateful, activated by the binaryData XML message. Overall, this is highly annoying.

If you want to get a feel for it, the best thing to do would be to drop into Wireshark and read the opening salvo of messages with the provided dissector. It's not perfect - especially when it hits video - but you can read the XML.

Let me ask you this: would you be more interested in protocol documents, or a C-compatible API for the existing Rust library that you could call from your new app?

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To the last question: both, in the form of code that's self explanitory :P

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For those that come across this issue: I just thought I would say that we now have some documentation here. It is not perfect but its a start. If you want to add to the docs about the protocol please do make a PR :)

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