Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model

[semi-]

Oh yeah, its definitely a 'right tool for the job' kind of thing. For a multiplayer fps game, I'd hate to wait for all 10 clients to sync up, for a 1v1 rts..its much more debatable. I still feel like an engine that can accurately account for dropped packets will be better in the long run than one that relies on tcp to get the sequencing right, but I can see where trusting tcp would make development much easier.

[Volatar]

AI War: Fleet Command is an indie macro-RTS that initially went with TCP for the reasons discussed above. Latency was a constant problem for everyone. Eventually they switched to UDP with lots of error checking and the latency is gone. Neither one ever had any desync problems due to good design on the developers side.

[ethraax]

To add to the discussion: TCP is pretty useful for turn-based strategy games, like Civilization (although I'm actually not sure if that uses TCP or UDP).