Data types

All data sent over the network is big-endian, that is the bytes are sent from most significant byte to least significant byte. The majority of everyday computers are little-endian, therefore it may be necessary to change the endianness before sending data over the network.

Other than 'String' and 'Metadata', which are decoded with a custom function, these data formats are identical to those provided by the Java classes DataInputStream and DataOutputStream.

	Size	Range	Notes
byte	1	-128 to 127	Signed, two's complement
short	2	-32768 to 32767	Signed, two's complement
int	4	-2147483648 to 2147483647	Signed, two's complement
long	8	-9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807	Signed, two's complement
float	4	See this	Single-precision 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point
double	8	See this	Double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 floating point
string	≥ 2 ≤ 240	N/A	UCS-2 big-endian string prefixed by a short containing the length of the string in code points. UCS-2 is a fixed-width encoding with each code point represented by a 16-bit code unit. As it is limited to 16 bits it can only represent code points in the Basic Multilangual Plane (U+0000 through U+FFFF inclusive).
bool	1	0 or 1	Value can be either true (0x01) or false (0x00)
metadata	Varies	See this

Some data may be stored as an "absolute integer", which is a more precise kind of integer, and a less precise kind of double. The conversion from double to absolute integer is like so:

abs_int = (int)double * 32;

And back again:

double = (double)abs_int / 32;