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posted by on Monday January 02 2017, @08:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the which-packet-is-right-for-you dept.

An introduction to networking for game programmers:

Hi, I'm Glenn Fiedler and welcome to the first article in my article series Networking for Game Programmers

In this article we start with the most basic aspect of network programming, sending and receiving data over the network. This is just the beginning – the simplest and most basic part of what network programmers do, but still it is quite intricate and non-obvious as to what the best course of action is. Take care because if you get this part wrong it will have terrible effects on your multiplayer game!

You have most likely heard of sockets, and are probably aware that there are two main types: TCP and UDP. When writing a network game, we first need to choose what type of socket to use. Do we use TCP sockets, UDP sockets or a mixture of both?

The choice you make depends entirely on what sort of game you want to network. So from this point on, and for the rest of this article series, I'm going to assume you want to network an action game. You know games like Halo, Battlefield 1942, Quake, Unreal, CounterStrke, Team Fortress and so on.


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  • (Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday January 02 2017, @09:33PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Monday January 02 2017, @09:33PM (#448654) Journal

    So? Did TCP and UDP change so much we need new textbooks?

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  • (Score: 1) by chucky on Monday January 02 2017, @09:36PM

    by chucky (3309) on Monday January 02 2017, @09:36PM (#448657)

    Well, it's not exactly news. One could simply look into a textbook to find the same.

    • (Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Monday January 02 2017, @11:43PM

      by pvanhoof (4638) on Monday January 02 2017, @11:43PM (#448699) Homepage

      Is it important for learning important things, that something is news? Rarely. GungnirSniper had a good point. Nether TCP nor UDP change so much we needed a new textbook. Nor did we need yet another "news" article: technical people are well aware of the both technical and use-case differences of TCP and UDP. It's up to the implementers to choose the right one. But op top of TCP or UDP, there is pipelining. Which works for both.

      In the end it all boils down to RFC 1925.

      Whether you like it or not.

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 03 2017, @07:58AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday January 03 2017, @07:58AM (#448820) Journal

        He probably assumed it has some significance that this site is called Soylent News.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Tuesday January 03 2017, @12:13PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday January 03 2017, @12:13PM (#448867) Journal
    Since 2008, SCTP went from being a weird research thing to a widely supported protocol, making most of the discussion irrelevant. Mobile networks went from being things that a few people used to being a huge percentage of total Internet traffic. IPv6 went from being a niche to something that worked out of the box on Windows Vista and is the native protocol for a few billion mobile devices.
    --
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