Attention all Hackers! The first Planets Nu API has arrived.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011
There has been a significant amount of interest in being able to build additional tools and utilities for working with planets data and even some thoughts about building completely new clients for other platforms. To help empower our very creative community we have created a new application programming interface (API). 

The purpose of an API is to make it easy for software developers to download and manipulate Planets data in their preferred programming language. This allows them to build tools that can display this data in interesting ways or on different platforms, find patterns or optimize the data, or to build interesting ways to play your turns or parts of your turns. 

Examples of things interested programmers could build would be: 
  • More graphs and display charts for scores and game info
  • Ability to view or play your turns in a clean and simple way on your phones
  • Create a very strong computer player
  • Create a tool to "double check" your turn for various things
  • ... and many more.
We look forward to seeing what can be created with this data!  

For Developers


This is the first Alpha version of the API and could be subject to change. We have implemented 4 API's thus far which allow you read only access to the game data. We will be adding several more API's including a Save API which will allow turn updates.  

The following API commands are now possible or proposed:
  • Login - Use this to acquire the apikey of a given player. 
  • List Games - List the games on the Planets Nu platform in various ways
  • Load Game Info - Load the publicly available data about a single game
  • Load Turn Data - Load a single players complete turn package
  • Save Turn Data [NOT YET IMPLEMENTED]
  • Create Game [NOT YET IMPLEMENTED]
  • Run Host [NOT YET IMPLEMENTED]
The API documentation table of contents can be found here: http://planets.nu/api-documentation

There is still a lot more documentation needed, but there should be enough to get you started. We want to make this API a success. So if you start on a project and find you need some additional information or a new specific API please write us using the Contact Us link. We will do our best to get you what you need or help you achieve your goals. 

A word of advice to all developers: "Start small, think big", there is a lot of fun to be had in building Planets related tools and in some ways it can be very easy, but the sheer volume of data that makes up a Planets universe is easy to underestimate. It might seem like a super idea to build a complete client for iPhone, and it is, but unless you have a year of your life to spare, start by building a message viewer, or VCR player or score display tool before jumping into the complete massive project. 

Have fun and let us know what you are building!