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I have a game I am working on and I heard that UDP is superior for real-time games. I know that socket.io uses TCP and was wondering if there is some way to switch it to UDP. I tried looking it up but only found posts from around 2012 which said UDP is only experimental in browsers.
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UDP sockets can be "connected" (or "established") or "unconnected". Connected sockets have a full 4-tuple associated {source ip, source port, destination ip, destination port}, unconnected sockets have 2-tuple {bind ip, bind port}.
TCP vs UDP Once connected, a TCP socket can only send and receive to/from the remote machine. This means that you'll need one TCP socket for each client in your application. UDP is not connection-based, you can send and receive to/from anyone at any time with the same socket.
The socket type is SOCK_STREAM . Datagram sockets allow processes to use UDP to communicate. A datagram socket supports bidirectional flow of messages. A process on a datagram socket can receive messages in a different order from the sending sequence and can receive duplicate messages.
A typical UDP server can be implemented using a single socket. Explain why, for a TCP driven server, I find that two sockets are created - one where all clients approach the server, and one specific (socket) for each client for further communication between the server and client.
From a standard browser, it is not possible.
From a browser client, socket.io uses either the http or the webSocket transport. Both http and webSocket are TCP connections, not UDP connections. So the browser client socket.io does not use UDP - it uses TCP.
As best I know, there is no standard UDP support in browsers accessible from regular HTML page Javascript so you can't even really try to build your own layer that uses UDP.
Other references on the topic:
Why Can't I Send UDP Packets From a Browser
Reading from udp port in browser
Chrome Supports TCP and UDP Sockets
Write a chrome extension to support UDP in browser
How to send a UDP Packet with Web RTC - Javascript?
How to talk to UDP sockets with HTML5?
Reading from udp port in browser
UDP can be a desirable transport for some circumstances when you want the packet to be delivered as soon as possible, but if it can't be delivered immediately, then just drop it. This is sometimes useful in gaming or even video streaming where the next packet will just contain the next update so if the previous one didn't come through, then no big deal and you'd rather not have TCP try to retransmit the lost packet. But, browsers don't support using the UDP protocol from web page Javascript.
If you want to connect to a UDP device or server from a browser, you will have to use some sort of proxy so your browser code can talk to the proxy over TCP (either http or webSocket) and then the proxy can handle the actual UDP communication with the device.
It would be possible to use the socket.io library from node.js or some other non-browser platform and write your own UDP transport add-in for socket.io that is built on the native UDP support in your platform. I believe socket.io has a somewhat pluggable transport so you could try to make your own transport and then configure both client and server to use that transport. This is not possible from the browser (without a native code plug-in installed in the browser) because there's no underlying UDP support in the browser that you could build your transport on, but in non-browser environments like node.js, you could do that.
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