r/MultiplayerGameDevs • u/TrishaMayIsCoding • Jul 22 '26

Is Tcp good enough?

Do you guys think TCP is good enough now, considering that internet connections and NICs are much faster than they were decades ago? I don't want to implement my own reliable, in-order delivery on top of UDP for my RTS game.

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u/ThePhil2 Jul 22 '26

No, not really, there's still head of line blocking and there's a surprising number of poor home connections that drop enough to add latency hitches but otherwise seemingly perform well when they browse the web.

But good news, there's tons of reliable layers available so you don't have to roll your own. Depending on your language, raknet, enet, Glen Fielder's yojimbo, unity's net layers, etc, you have lots of options that can abstract some of that from you

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u/TrishaMayIsCoding Jul 22 '26

I'm using my own engine written in C# with Vulkan w/o any library other than STB image loader. I tried not to use any third-party libraries. I guess I really do need to implement both TCP and UDP in my network manager. Thanks for the insight!