Hybrid Networking for Game Development | Generated by AI
You’re right—Person B’s explanation is spot-on.
It’s not redundant because selective reliability gives game developers exactly what they need: fine-grained control over network behavior. Here’s why this hybrid approach makes sense:
The Trade-Off
- TCP: Guarantees delivery and order, but its retransmission and congestion control introduce latency—unacceptable for fast-paced games.
- Plain UDP: Fast and unordered, but completely unreliable—problematic for critical game events.
Selective Reliability on UDP
Games can cherry-pick what needs guarantees and what doesn’t:
Reliable (Ordered, Acknowledged)
- Player actions: shooting, ability activation
- Game state changes: item pickups, player death, score updates
- Cheat prevention: transaction verification
Unreliable (Best-effort)
- Position/rotation updates: newest packet supersedes old ones
- Voice chat: occasional loss is tolerable
- Particle effects, non-critical visual fluff
Real-World Examples
- Quake III Arena (and many FPS games since)
- ENet library (popular in multiplayer indies)
- RakNet (used in Minecraft before Microsoft acquisition)
This approach avoids head-of-line blocking (where one lost packet stalls everything behind it) while ensuring critical data arrives. It’s the best of both worlds for interactive, real-time applications where milliseconds matter.