SteamHelper is a project organized within a single workspace, that plans to offer an extensible way to communicate to Steam's Network.
Feel free to send a PR to increase the quality of this documentation. To discuss more about the project, you can enter our Discord here.
Steam has various interconnected systems and at this page you will find how it works so you can also contribute, or fix if some update break functionality.
Steam uses Protocol Buffer as its mechanism to serialize structured data, but on the contrary of JSON that is human readable, protobufs are binary encoded. You can learn more about it here.
Since protobufs are language neutral, on steam-protobuf crate we automatically
generate bindings to the rust language from the Protobufs submodule which
contains the regurlarly dumped Steam Protobufs .proto files.
There proto files are provided by SteamDatabase that are dumped regularly with a tool named ProtobufDumper.
Before you start manipulating your account, you will need to establish a connection with a Steam Content Manager Server (CM) through a socket. You can connect to it only through a WebSocket and TcpSocket, UDP is now being deprecated. After the connection is established, you can then login into the network.
Steam sends messages related to your account at the socket you have connected. These messages may or not be protobuf binary encoded messages, so we need to check it along with its type, since any message can be trasmitted through this stream.
We call this message we are receiving internally as EMsg, or Encoded Message.
Every message that needs to be sent to Steam's Network, need to be serialized,
and encrypted if that is the case. You can find helper cryptographic functions
on steam-crypto crate.