> > In other words, "real-time" in the sense that missing deadlines will mean that the quality of service is degraded. Deadlines here mean delivering the packet

> > In other words, "real-time" in the sense that missing deadlines will mean that the quality of service is degraded. Deadlines here mean delivering the packets in time for the next simulation timestep. > Yeah, that’s what happens in most RTS, if the feedback for the action you sent doesn’t come back before Xms, then the game pauses and waits (for example Starcraft 2 does that). To elaborate on this further, I would not consider Starcraft 2 a real time system, because it can stop the world and wait. It is annoying when it starts lagging but produces the "correct" results anyway. This is not the case for simulators that deal with "continuous" physics updates. All clients are simulating the world in parallel and no one has the authority to stop everything. If lag gets significant, the results will become more and more incorrect and the view of the world that the clients have will diverge more. There's always some inaccuracy but that is tolerable to some degree. This is by no means the only or necessarily the correct definition of real time but that's where I draw the distinction when it comes to multiplayer games. Someone might not agree with me on this one.