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by shultays 3398 days ago

  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

1 comments

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)