[MUD-Dev] UDP vs TCP for MUD/MMORPG project.

[Ryan Arthur]

From: Jason Slaughter

> Is this true??? Is UDP really that big of a problem? It seems like
> scare-mongering to me, or that people are just so used to TCP that
> they don't know any different... but my technical knowledge of the
> subject isn't great (I am doing this as a learning project), so I
> could be totally wrong. I would greatly appreciate people's
> advice!

Jason,

I asked myself the same thing when I was designing a MMOG a few
years ago.  My natural inclination was towards UDP which a majority
of MMOG's use. Anarchy Online uses (as of last year) TCP because as
they claim it gives better ping and the connection is not dropped as
much as UDP.

TCP has error checking, splits data into packets and can be slow.

UDP does not have the same reliability but you get timeliness. You
can also implement indepedent connections ("streams") with
reliability on some streams through extra software layers and
timeliness on others.

An analogy..

TCP -> Retail product, comes with manuals, a box, discs, etc

UDP -> OEM. What you see is what you get.

Research links:

  http://wand.cs.waikato.ac.nz/wand/publications/jamie_420/final/node1.html
  http://www.daemon.org/tcp.html

In the end for a MMOG-like game as EQ I'd rather go with UDP,
however for a text-based MUD TCP is it. If you optimistically plan
to have over a few thousand people I would suggest UDP.

Cheers,

Ryan

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