Is the TCP protocol good enough for real-time multiplayer games?

Posted by kevin42 on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by kevin42
Published on 2010-07-15T13:19:12Z Indexed on 2012/11/12 17:24 UTC
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Back in the day, TCP connections over dialup/ISDN/slow broadband resulted in choppy, laggy games because a single dropped packet resulted in a resync. That meant a lot of game developers had to implement their own reliability layer on top of UDP, or they used UDP for messages that could be dropped or received out of order, and used a parallel TCP connection for information that must be reliable.

Given the average user has faster network connections now, can a real time game such as an FPS give good performance over a TCP connection?

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