Is the TCP protocol good enough for real-time multiplayer games?
- by kevin42
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?