[jonathanlydall]

This is already done by many audio/video chat compression algorithms which use UDP.

The idea being that with something like voice or video, if a packet doesn’t arrive, instead of stalling everything while you wait for a retransmit, you instead just carry on regardless.

The occasional missing packet in voice is almost imperceptible, however the more packets that get lost the more the voice seems to “break up”.

With video the symptoms are an accumulation of visual corruption until the next key frame.

FPS games also do this (or at least used to), servers would send a stream of UDP packets of entity states (as opposed to sending deltas of state changes), so things like player1 is at x,y,z coordinate with velocity a and heading vector of b.

If clients missed a packet they would just wait for the next one since it’s useless to know later where someone else was, all you actually care about is where they are, or what’s happening, now.

[YZF]

I think the ask is for something like let a bit flip inside the UDP packet or let a byte fall out of the UDP packet. The integrity of UDP packets is still checked for (at different layers).

For most networks the error rate is so low that I don't think it's that valuable. Also you'd still want your metadata checked otherwise it'll get potentially delivered to the wrong place.

[nsteel]

That's what I assumed they meant but there's so many layers of correction/protection going on and most of it is non-optional if you want a working system. For example, if you disabled the FEC that's used over high-speed serdes links within a core router you'll be left with a broken system, the error rate is much too high. In the designs I've worked on you can't disable the internal CRC/ECC on the databuses without risking corrupting the control data, which won't end well. Nobody provides separate data and control ECC protection, that's pointless overhead.

I guess they probably meant disable checking the ethernet FCS, that might still work but I think it's a very bad plan. I doubt this option is even exposed to network operators.

[ultrahax]

Most engines I've seen will delta all the entity states against the client's last acknowledged state. Costs some memory and computation on both sides to keep the deltas valid, but keeps the state update to under an MTU, generally.