Re: [glob2-devel] Alpha 20 Preperations

[Stéphane Magnenat]

> <advocate client="devil">UDP has much lower overhead and you have the
> possibility to drop non-critical packets to the floor, also dropped packets
> (by network congestion) don't stall the whole pipe but can be resent and
> integrated later.</advocate>

Exactly. With UDP, we are able to sustain some packet loss without affecting 
the game speed (as every order is sent twice in packet N an packet N+1). This 
won't be possible with TCP. Any packet loss will stall the game. Furthermore, 
as I said before, UDP is required to trick NAT and firewalls, look at that 
article for a scientific analysis :
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/p2pnat.pdf

So switching to TCP is not impossible, but it is a huge change and should 
definitively not happen before 1.0, and even after I think that, for today's 
network model, UDP is much better suited for the task. Now, I don't say we 
should not write a clean and well documented lib based on the previous 
article to encapsulate the UDP complexity and allow syntetic testing of 
network layer alone. Such a lib would be very usefull.

Steph

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