On Sat, Jul 29, 2000 at 05:23:46AM -0400, Zachary Uram wrote: > I've noticd that when I select UDP netrek seems much laggier > versus when I select UDP. I am wondering why this is? What makes > the one protocol faster than the other? TCP guarantees that packets arrive in sequence. So if you lose a packet, the whole stream freezes waiting on it to arrive; after a TCP timeout, it gets resent, and then the stream catches up. This really sucks from a netrek standpoint; you may be waiting on something trivial like an update of torp or ship positions, when the data in the next packet would update the same information again. UDP does not have any guaranteed delivery, so dropped packets are just dropped. In netrek, TCP is used for a few kinds of information, like messages, and UDP is used for the rest (if you turn it on). -Tom