4 ms·
I can confirm this, having been mostly responsible for the network code in Widelands. We exclusively used TCP with parallel simulation (i.e., only player action
by nhaehnle 13y ago
I can confirm this, having been mostly responsible for the network code in Widelands. We exclusively used TCP with parallel simulation (i.e., only player actions are transmitted), and it worked just fine as early as 2007 even without any special tweaks. There are two factors that matter, I believe:
First, Widelands is a real-time game but with a slow pace, so relatively high latency is easy to tolerate. Second, the internet is simply more reliable today than it was 15 years ago, especially if the bandwidth that you use is small relative to the Mb/s connections that are common today.
- willvarfar 13y agoThe players were on 28K modems; it was a very different world before broadband even.
- exDM69 13y ago> First, Widelands is a real-time game but with a slow pace, so relatively high latency is easy to tolerate. Second, the internet is simply more reliable today than it was 15 years ago, especially if the bandwidth that you use is small relative to the Mb/s connections that are common today. Exactly. TCP is fine if you can tolerate 3-5 round trip times' worth of latency. RTT to the other side of the world is ~135 milliseconds at the speed of light. That's roughly one second of latency for a less than optimal network connection. Probably just fine for an RTS game or a not quite real time MMO. It is not, however, good enough for fast paced FPS games, racing sims or (space) flight sims. They will keep on working better with UDP as long as there will be latency and packet loss in the Internet.
- mcguire 13y agoDid you use a server, rather than peer-to-peer communications between players?
- nhaehnle 13y agoOne of the players acted as a server, though this was actually more to avoid the headaches associated with NAT rather than for bandwidth reasons.