Status?

[BobDenny]

It appears that you two have done whole load of work to establish comms with Run8 amd to lay down a framework for a dispatch system. Amazing actually. Your work is spectacularly professional! I'm unsure how you learned of Run8's service API. Did you abandon this effort due to exhaustion or potential hostility from Run8 Studios or the communith or ???

[Hawk777]

I'm unsure how you learned of Run8's service API.

The communication protocol is not something Run8 invented. It’s a standard, documented by Microsoft, which Run8 used. It’s the .NET Binary Format with In-Band Dictionary transported over the .NET Message Framing Protocol over a TCP socket. So you can actually decode all the messages by just hooking up an existing external dispatcher program and watching the data with Wireshark (or another packet sniffer) then decoding it according to those specifications.

Did you abandon this effort due to exhaustion or potential hostility from Run8 Studios or the communith or ???

I started working on IECC8 back in the V2 days. I think Mr. Balls’ External Dispatcher (the one on The Depot website) didn’t support V2 yet, and I thought it would be fun. Programming it was, but gathering all the ID numbers and trying to cram the track into the layout ended up not being so much fun; SBD, and Alhambra subs came out and made the territory even larger; External Dispatcher was released for V2; and then V3 came out and altered the position of some switches and signals and also provided a much nicer-looking in-game dispatch board. At that point I didn’t feel the benefit was worth the time any more (honestly, it felt like Run8 was releasing new territory faster than I could incorporate it!).