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The IETF Digs Online Games

18/04/07

I’m currently reading through a load of networking documentation for an upcoming exam. In an RFC on DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol, in case anybody’s interested), I stumbled over something that I found quite intriguing…

DCCP implements a congestion-controlled, unreliable flow of datagrams for use by applications such as streaming media or on-line games.

[…]

These applications, including streaming audio, Internet telephony, and multiplayer and massively multiplayer on-line games, share a preference for timeliness over reliability.

[…]

Of these issues, applications that generate large or long-lived flows of datagrams, such as media transfer and games, mostly care about controlling the trade-off between timing and reliability.

RFC 4336 (emphasis by me)

Usually, RFCs only reference the “boring” applications like IP telephony or (but only if they feel like getting really fancy) “interactive multi-media systems”, but this one actually mentions games multiple times as something that even deserves protocol-level support. Games as a first-class citizen! I wouldn’t have expected that from an RFC, for me a synonym for bone-dry tech talk so far.

This is today’s highlight for me, *sigh*…

About

Hi, how are you? My name is Georg Kaindl, and I'm a twenty-something from Vienna, Austria. During the day, I'm a CS student at the Vienna University of Technology, but at night, I turn into an independent software developer for the Macintosh platform, social nerd, lazy entrepreneur and intuitive researcher.

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