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Comment by daredevildave | Hacker News Reader

They might want to switch that to the UDP server ( dgram ) Networked games over TCP is not usually recommended: http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp...

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UDP is not always the best protocol for networked games. TCP can be a good choice for games which exchange only or mostly important messages which must not be dropped and delivered in sending order (eg. most round-based games). To make that work with UDP you'd end up re-implementing a lot of already existing functionality inside TCP.

UDP is supposed to be better for real-time games, but both Minecraft and World of Warcraft actually do great with TCP.

They can't if the minecraft client uses TCP.

Doh, sorry, obviously.

In which case, I wonder whether he (notch) is going to have trouble with the online performance. I've tried online play briefly and it didn't seem bad, I guess it isn't really twitch based.

I've played online (a few weeks ago) and there did seem to be problems with the server due to periodic GC causing massive lag and disconnections every so often.

It could also be people laying minecart track. This, unfortunately, completely kills the server and makes it need to be restarted.

in my experience, tracks on smp hosed the clients, not the server.

Server takes a massive hit as well.

Maybe DCCP [1] would be better. Non-congestion controlled protocols are bad for the internet.

[1]: Datagram Congestion Control Protocol: http://read.cs.ucla.edu/dccp/

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