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

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Caronne


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Don't just accept a straight "yes or no cuz I said so" type answer here as you may be opening up yourself to having to fight a bunch of problems with UDP that actually you don't need to face.

None of the other answers here state the obvious way to prove this.

Take some simple facts

An IP header is 20 bytes no matter what protocol you use.
UDP headers are 4 bytes
TCP headers are 20 bytes
So each time you send a message of 1 byte down the line you have actually sent either 25 or 41 bytes depending on protocol assuming an IP header is also needed.

sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
My advice

Take your situation where you need client server interaction, estimate the number of clients then do the math based on the data you actually send between the 2.

An Example

Lets say I send 10 messages that are 1 byte each per update in my game and i'm updating around 60 fps so I need to send 60 * 10 = 600 bytes per second of actual message data + the relevant headers.

Now depending on the game I could send that all as a single message so my overhead from the TCP layer is just 40 bytes (effectively a cost over UDP of 20 bytes per second), not having that overhead is a potential cost of 600 bytes (because I may have to resend the whole message stream).

If however it's vitally important that every message be sent on its own the very instant its ready to be sent, I have 600 messages (also 600 bytes) + 40 * 600 = 24k worth of TCP overhead or ~14k of UDP overhead per second + 600 bytes of message data.

Again, we ask the questions, how vital are those messages, how frequent are they, and can they be batched up in some way to reduce the overheads?

That's just based on a bunch of single byte messages, typically you would do something very different but without knowing the raw data being sent its hard to prove either way if TCP is a better fit to your situation than UDP.

So, will it work?

Well, if you have a typical fps, and position is important (to avoid cheating or incorrect decisions), you need to know that your network stream is realiable, but 32 players each streaming that 24k + message bytes back and forth (so 768KB/s + messages) ... that's about a 10mb/s broadband line just for individual headers based on sending at least 1 message per frame from each client to all the other clients via a server.

You obviously won't code your server and client to work that way and the message sizes are very likely to be a lot bigger and probably a bit less frequent than 1 byte per frame in most situations so it's hard to say without seeing a real world "this is the data I need to send" example.

My case

I have made the call in my case that its a reasonable overhead but that's based on how I build my message streams so I don't have huge overheads compared to some designs.

TCP works fine and I have a scaleable MMO server and client framework but I don't need to stream lots of data ever frame or lots of small packets because I can batch my calls.

for others: TCP just won't do, and they can only use UDP but have to accept that it won't give them assurances about what they get (ordering / arrival guarantee).

Other considerations

Many poorly coded game engines handle everything on the main thread on the cpu so the cpu is often only given a very small amount of time to handle networking code, a decent implementation of both the serve and the client would be entirely async and possibly push and pull messages in batches.

There are some good networking libraries out there but as seen here, many seem to have an opinion that UDP is "just better", well factor in your own needs first and that may not be the case, and finding a library that doesn't factor in things the way you do may result in a poorly coded TCP setup in comparison to the UDP variant in the same lib (i'm just saying i've seen this, and load tests have proven it).

Build something first a technical base of the data you want to be sending and test it then do the math to scale it up, worst case load test it by deploying to a cloud and have 50 computers run a test client to see if it can handle your limit of 32 players per game (or whatever limits you may have).


https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/431/is-the-tcp-protocol-good-enough-for-real-time-multiplayer-games

https://juliosperandio.directorioforuns.com

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