Quote: "TCP means that delivery of data packets is guaranteed every time a packet is sent. this is unnecessary in if the player position keeps changing because the app has to send 10's of messages over a short time which will cause the system to slowdown. "
I don't mean to be rude, but confirmation is essential in almost all types of games. Do you remember the days of modem-to-modem games such as DOOM and the original Command & Conquer, where Out Of Sync errors were the rule, not the exception? These were caused by absent error correction (confirmation). They used rapid fire position updating that worked most of the time, allowing the game to go on for a while. However, if there were a short string of missed packets, just once, you'd desync and the connection was lost, terminating the session. This is impossible with the TCPIP protocol, and stability is paramount.
In games where certain statistics (like, as you say, player position) are updating rapidly, you are right in that you don't want to have to confirm hundreds of updates per second - but there are far more efficient ways of handling player position instead of merely sending an update every time it changes, and these methods don't require nearly as much throughput. My MMORPG, Solodor, is capable of maintaining accurate positioning for tens of thousands of entities across hundreds of clients simultaneously with a minimum of bandwidth using such techniques (finite-state entity syncing combined with entity interpolation and predictive input handling). Desyncs are outright impossible unless the connection itself is broken. An entity's position can update anywhere up to forty times per second, and yet I only send positioning updates at absolute most only two or three times per second, and with each update being only nine bits long I'll never saturate any server-like bandwidth.
If you don't use some kind of error correction or delivery confirmation (ie, the TCPIP protocol) then you have
no alternative but to flood the network with rapid-fire updates to ensure that a missed packet has no discernible effect. I can't think of any type of game where this is preferable to modern-day low-volume high-accuracy communication techniques.
That kind of went on longer than I'd intended it to, but I didn't want the new guy operating on incomplete advice
I
wholeheartedly recommend TCPIP for just about all conceivable requirements of netcode, and
actively discourage the use of UDP. If you write your netcode properly, you'll have failsafe packet delivery and low volume bandwidth requirements.
