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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

Also, nowadays, there are (usually) no more slow and brittle dialup modems in place any more. A connection without packet loss is way more common these days than one with.

This makes TCP much more feasible (and sometimes necessary as getting UDP packets through various NAT routers can be difficult).

Back then, they were probably right to use UDP, but I found it funny how all the reasons they gave why TCP sucked were things their workarounds were equally bad at.

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All of this engineering and technical analysis is wonderful and interesting, but it doesn't change the fact that Lucas Arts sold this game for a big chunk of change to my teenage self (I did farm work to earn my money) and it was a HUGE, DISAPPOINTING RIPOFF. The single player AND multi-player aspects of the game were shit. It was rushed to production by the publisher and it showed.

I realize that it was a huge technological leap for early 1997, I really do. But the product was shit and we paid good money for it.

Edit: I meant to add something. 11 months after XvT was released, Volition Software released Descent: Freespace. It was everything that XvT should have been. Nobody noticed it but whatever. (I admit I'm probably being unfair since the internet was changing so fast back then)

> I found it funny how all the reasons they gave why TCP sucked were things their workarounds were equally bad at.

I have yet to see anything designed with UDP instead of TCP that didn't end up reimplementing TCP itself, poorly.

Problem is that you usually only want a subset of what TCP does, and sometimes the simplest/most straightforward way of getting that is a little reliability sauce over a standard UDP connection.

But TCP is developed for everyone, while you can develop your own custom TCP for your own task.

Most games that use UDP do not reimplement TCP because data that is too old is simply not relevant to the game anymore so it is not resent. If TCP had a way to indicate messages shouldn't be delivered anymore that would be great.

I haven't used a dial-up modem since ~1999, and have had 7 different connections in 6 different cities on the west coast in that time. ~0.5-3% packetloss has never stopped rearing its head, especially during prime time. If you've got a magic source of packetloss-free last-mile connections, I'd love to hear about it.

I live in switzerland and I have been using DSL and tv cable modems since 2001 and I never had packet loss (unless there was something broken on the providers end and subsequently fixed by them - this was something that lasted for maybe a day or two)

Yes, there's pretty much no packet loss in normal conditions if you measure using ping.

But in real world scenarios there are lots of reasons for packet loss, congestion being the most important. Have your little brother turn on a bit torrent client on a DSL line when you're playing counter strike and you will experience packet loss for sure.

No, no, no.

Your understanding of TCP is wrong. Packet loss is a natural part of the process. When a link is saturated, a router should drop packets and notify the sender to slow down.

When ISPs engineer their networks to not drop packets they add larger buffers, packets wait at the last hop and instead of high speed you get high latency. Games lag at the expence of bandwidth.

Read up about buffer bloat.

Games should use UDP, as its not important if 0.5% of position updates don't get through, but it is important the get through quickly.

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