SEIV Gold Demo does *not* have TCP/IP

[robinleepowell]

No, wait, before you flame.

I'm serious.

It uses UDP/IP.

This is *not* the same thing. In particular, pretty much every firewall on the planet can handle NATed connections using TCP/IP.

Pretty much none of them can handle UDP without special configuration. Usually not even then.

Using UDP only makes sense when speed is of the essence, and even then is a pretty bad idea.

I was unable to play with a friend of mine until he completely removed his firewall (a low-end linksys router), even though he had told it to forward all incoming traffic to his machine (it wouldn't let UDP out).

So, as TCP/IP play is really important to me (I don't have e-mail accounts on the machines I play SEIV from; I using linux for e-mail), I would really like to know why the SEIV Gold demo doesn't have it, and when this is likely to be fixed.

Thank you.

-Robin

[Suicide Junkie]

That is something to send to Malfador directly.
(Send to: info@malfador.com)

[robinleepowell]

Will do, thanks.

-Robin

[geoschmo]

While I do agree that it would be nice if it were easier/possible to play through a firewall, our experience with testing it on the beta team showed that speed was very much an issue.

With several players (I think we had as many as five in one game), if any players are on dialups it can take a long time to get the files to eveyone. Especially if the host is on a dialup modem

This is an area I have very little expertise in, but if changing it to make it more accesable through firewalls is going to slow it down even more, ugh.

Geoschmo

[robinleepowell]

Actually, UDP is *worse* for transfer of anything larger than the size of a single packet (generally <1KB).

Substantially worse, actually. If SEIV Gold is using UDP for the actual turn transfers (which I didn't test), it would probably get rather a lot faster with TCP/IP. *Especially* over dialup.

The only advantages to UDP are that individual packets get there faster (at the cost of losing many of them) and it's easier to program.

-Robin

[geoschmo]

Well, if that's the case, by all means please suggest it to Aaron. Anything that would speed it up I am all for.

Geoschmo

[robinleepowell]

To be a lot more specific, here's an IRC chat with people who know more about networking than I can even begin to describe (I work at a company that has some people that are truly frighteningly good with networking):

- -------------

<me> General technical question: is UDP still going to be faster than TCP when

<me> you're using it to send like large files and such?

<speaker1> what does it mean that UDP is faster than TCP?

<speaker1> define "faster"

<me> Uhhh, I'm transfering a 100K of data from machine a to machine b.

<me> Faster is defined as it would be in a dictionary.

<me> 'Takes less time'.

<speaker1> your data won't get tehre if you use UDP

<speaker1> and it will if you use TCP

<speaker1> so I guess infinity is kinda slow

<speaker1> unless you implement guaranteed delivery on top of UDP

<me> Assuming that the UDP-based mechanism ... yeah, that.

<speaker1> in which case you may as well use TCP and take a couple extra round trips for the connection setup

<speaker2> then you're just reimpling tcp

<me> Cool, thanks.

<speaker4> If you need the entire file then use TCP

<speaker4> If you can afford to loose chunks but you want to get the data you do get sooner then use UDP

<speaker2> or if you don't need the data to be in sequence

<speaker2> but you need all of it

* speaker3 has flashbacks to shouting this argument at Dreamcast game developers

<speaker1> well, you still won't get all of it without guaranteed delivery

<speaker2> right, but you can build guaranteed delivery without sequencing very easily

<me> Yes, I am trying to explain to people on a game forum that if you have 5 people connected to a game where it occasionally transfers large amounts of data (relative to packet size), with no data
transfer between those (it's turn based), it will *not*
slow down when you move to TCP.

<me> Especially when several players are on modems.

<speaker1> uh, of course not

<speaker1> it'll just take a half second longer to start up the connection

- ------------

-Robin

[robinleepowell]

Furthermore:

- -----------

<speaker3> as a matter of fact when dealing with modems you are likely to see an improvement in performance when moving to TCP

<speaker2> why's that?

<speaker2> you talking about header compression?

<speaker3> yes, and the fact that some dailup servers will drop udp sooner than tcp packets because the tcp ones will just get
+retransmitted

[Zarix]

I have a firewall that should be able to work with UDP. It has setting that has to be used during Online gaming that allows UDP and TCP. Although I haven't ever tried it with any UDP game. All games I can think of use TCP.

[geoschmo]

Heh. I love geekspeak.

Suggestion, cut/paste that convo into your email to Malfador. It's greek to me mostly, but it might mean something to them.

But try and be polite.

Geo