[mostafaberg]

I'm surely wrong at many things yes, but you are also wrong at some points, if i play a game in a bad network setting, UDP will still be a bad option, packets will be probably very mangled on a bad network and will offer no superiority over TCP, you will see more blockage on TCP, but you will probably also see your player jump all over the place with UDP coming in totally out of order, and if you implement your own way of reordering packets, then you are almost reimplementing TCP over UDP again. if a network is bad, it's bad no matter what networking protocol you'll be using.

The only thing that makes UDP faster is that it comes without TCP's convenience features, and for many games, this is more than enough and the performance penalty is not usually worth it (unless you're a AAA with lots of resources and dedicated team just for the networking part)

besides that if you simply opt-in to UDP because it's better, then you'll spend much more time working on the network than actually working on the game.

my problem was with the generalisation in the premise, that `UDP is better than TCP for networked games`, this is not the case for a deterministic game of chess or any card/board game.

UDP's only point in this article is realtime data intensive games like FPS'es.

also I'm not putting security into consideration in this argument.

What's your thoughts ?

[shultays]

  then you are almost reimplementing TCP over UDP again

you implement TCP features only when you need them. player positions for example are not critical, you can miss some but your game would still work if you are interpolating things correctly. if your player position message gets lost, you don't need it anyway you only need the newest position. same goes for order of the packets, if you are not needing such a thing, your lost packets would delay everything in the game.

For these reasons, TCP suffers a lot more if the network is bad. You really don't need to be a AAA company to implement TCP features on UDP.

  UDP's only point in this article is realtime data intensive games like FPS'es.

Well article says, as you quoted:

> It would greatly improve the networking of these games.

And 'these games' are he means real time games like agario. It is not a FPS but it is a real time game. There is no reason to use UDP if it is a turn based game, like a card game. But a real time is pretty much always would be better with UDP

[mostafaberg]

Totally agree with you there, but player position criticality is not for me or you to decide, it's game dependant, my worries is not about dropped packets, but packets that are in the wrong order, only in a game where combat has to be precise I would say it's critical.

Yeah you don't need to be a AAA for sure, i was exaggerating a bit to make my point, what i'm trying to say is that newcomers to gamedev will end up struggling, TCP isn't easy, neither is UDP, without proper understanding of both protocols there will surely be mistakes made.

I do agree with the article 100%, I'm not saying in that use case that TCP is better, I'm just disagreeing with the premise as it's a bit vague and implies that you know what agar.io and slither.io are, I know both games and i know they're realtime, but there are people out there who don't know what they are, so I'm saying that just thinking that UDP is faster than TCP so it's best for networked games is naive, a better way to say it is just mentioning that this is for realtime games, better yet realtime games that can't allow network delays and are not critical, WOW for example uses TCP for some parts of the game that are not critical, where player position doesn't really affect the game, they end up with huge latency now and then, but the game is programmed in a way that some latency won't matter. in other cases they use UDP, that's also one of my reasons to say that UDP is not the only answer.

So yes, you are 100% right, and the article is 100% right, I just don't like the premise (the way it was written at least)