[vworld-tech] Some resources for ... TCP UDP

[Brian Hook]

> Of course, you missed out on one niggling point; with UDP, you may
> get the aforementioned packets in any given order.  

Sure, but that's a given -- it's up to the application whether it 
cares or not.  My point is that stalling delivery of ALL packets 
because just one arrives out of order is rather bad.

> I can't immediately think of anything other than player to player
> conversation which is not immediately required to be in-order in
> all but turn based games.  

Well, there are architectures that don't require in order delivery at 
all and work very well (Quake 3).

> The best justification I can give you is; go write a functioning,
> minimum-feature TCP replacement that performs at least as
> efficiently as any given TCP implementation out there.  

I'm not trying to be snitty, but that's not a justification.  I guess 
I'm a bit defensive that I was taken to task for making assertions 
without justification, and so far the counterarguments have been 
equally unfounded =)

I could basically say the same thing, "Go implement in TCP if you 
don't believe me, but don't say I didn't warn you".

> pretty heavy duty network code.  Sometimes the choice that people
> make ends up being wrong, and their custom code layered on UDP is
> worse than TCP.  Of course, if it works 'well enough' then who
> cares.

I'm unaware of any successful real-time networked games that use TCP, 
I think that's a pretty strong (non)existence proof that TCP is 
insufficient for real-time networked 3D games.  I stand by that 
assertion, and I don't many people that disagree.

The complaint is that I assert that TCP is inadequate compared to UDP 
but I didn't give any "technical" reasons for this.  I'll try to 
address this later, but so far the counterarguments haven't exactly 
been any stronger.

Brian