[chrisfarms]

> Video games tend to use UDP for the same reason everyone else mentioned does: timeliness. You want the most recent position of the various game objects now, and you don't give a shit about where they were 100ms ago.

This is only true for games that can replicate their entire state in each packet.

There are many situations where this is infeasible and so you may be replicating diffs of the state, partial state, or even replicating the player inputs instead of any state at all.

In those cases the "latest" packet is not necessarily enough, the "timliness" property does not quite cover the requirements, and like with most things, it's a "it depends".

[swiftcoder]

With those requirements raw datagrams also don't fit the bill, so you'll need to build some sort of reliable stream abstraction over UDP (with optional unreliable delivery for the state which you can replicate quickly)... and now we're closing in on QUIC territory