I also expect it's a bit of an arms race. (Destiny)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Friday, April 15, 2016, 20:49 (3238 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Games pretty much all use udp. Multiplayer games probably could not function otherwise. Google the postmortem for Xwing va Tie Fighter for a great explanation why.

Yeah, I know about TCP and how spectacularly it can fail for speedy delivery in poor network conditions, I just forget sometimes. My degree in CS had an emphasis in Networking (should have went for the software engineering emphasis as that's what I've done for my entire career... anyway). Being in my wired world I see the HUGE improvements that the net's made in the past 18 years and forget that people still have really really crappy connections (wifi/LTE) and I think, "oh, maybe TCP doesn't fail so badly anymore". When I forget this I'm oh so very wrong, TCP still has those massive failures, especially when using OTA connections.

So, yeah, Destiny definitely uses UDP, but at the application layer they have to implement features similar to TCP and I was pondering how they could detect a break in just upstream communication. When detecting it they could flag subsequent packets sent/received as being "suspect" and thus trigger an improved reconciliation of conflicting game states (Damage Referee anyone?).

Anyway, I'd love to see an article done by Chris Butcher & crew about their networking stack and how they handle that sort of thing. Just so I could geek out over it. :)