Switch over to a binary protocol

[sharvil]

XHR supports sending/receiving binary data through xhr.responseType = 'arraybuffer'.

[chrisburkegg]

Hey @sharvil,

Do you think the performance could be improved significantly by switching to a binary protocol? I'm considering starting the changes in the next couple of weeks.

I've never used the Protocol Buffers project but I think it could be ideal as it allows for binary encoding, and it would be much easier for development than writing a TLV type encoder/decoder.

What's your plan on the implementation client-side?

Cheers,

Chris

[chrisburkegg]

Been playing with encoding/decoding a simple message format, the protobuf project JS support is currently relatively undocumented but seems to work well enough (and there's Closure-style support!). This could also allow for a simpler abstraction for extending the game protocol.

[chrisburkegg]

Started on the protobuf task at https://github.com/krslynx/dotproduct-protobuf -- will first integrate into axiom and attempt to cleanly add it into dotproduct.