One only needs a cursory scan of the top posts to recognize this; ~80% of discussion revolves around braindead slop peddlers.

Ofcourse legacy compatibility trumps all, along with the ubiquity of NATs and roaming and we're now just in the sunk-cost phase, being left saddled with a horribly bloated protocol (128-bit addresses was a marketing choice; not engineering) that solves no problems.

One interesting case for a particular Netgear family of routers was that, while the traffic would survive end-to-end it was not without corruption - very specific corruption which took the form of zeroing the first 4 bytes. Given this aligns with where the src/dst ports would normally be, I suspect it was being treated as TCP/UDP albeit without the actual translation path taken.

For reference, bypassing the kernel you can saturate a 10G link for ~14Mpps on a single downclocked 500MHz core with same class of hardware.

Stuck on phone at the moment; will check out the code later.

Unless you know what you're doing, just pick the real low-hanging fruit, like throwing some threads at file block decompression.

The project in question --a platform for AoE2 multiplayer /w general game improvements-- is currently under development, although the core game/MP has been functional for over a year now and our little beta-testing group plays regularly.

In the end this is still a decision regarding how to handle player's falling behind; too far and they're effectively taken out of the game as they're no longer interacting within a sufficient approximation of the current state.

Under what design is "high ping" going to cause the game to run at lower "speed"? The only possibility I can see is where-in the turn period is, for some bizarre reason, also the granularity of the simulation step and you're also adapting the turn based on player latency (in aid of fairness, usually)

Having implemented such a system myself, a few times now, it has in practice performed sufficiently well.

DE is garbage in general so it's not really a fair comparison.

Consider for instance the situation where-in one player's simulation enters the spiral-of-death, under the policy that you're proposing this player is effectively removed from the game; I would say this is a substantially worse trade-off -- I know that I would personally prefer some mild annoyance of brief pausing as opposed to a player leaving the game (and in session-based games, as RTS's generally are, a team-mate leaving often ruins the entire game)

Abuse is indeed a problem that most games I've seen of this nature don't address, and while there's no perfect solution, it can be quite effectively curtailed. In the systems I've designed, the basic principle is that each participating player has an allocated amount of wait time which serves as a quota that is charged while-ever the game can progress/run, but cannot, due to them being in a wait-state (connecting/loading/reconnecting/stalling/explicit pausing/whatever). There's some extra logic for handling the oscillation of wait-state.

- On the highest difficulty ("Hardest"), AIs are bestowed 500 to all resources on next-age research completion. - Work rates for researches are skewed to be slower for the lowest-difficulty setting.

However, I have been entertaining the idea of supporting other deterministic (RTS-) games, adapting them the same way --rearchitecting the multiplayer system/code-- as I have done for Age of Empires II, providing a unified platform for these games. The first candidate that came to mind was the Red Alert series.