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Some games today use a network system that transmits messages over UDP, and ensures that the messages are reliable and ordered.
For example, RakNet is a popular game network engine. It uses only UDP for its connections, and has a whole system to ensure that packets can be reliable and ordered if you so choose.
My basic question is, what’s up with that? Isn’t TCP the same thing as ordered, reliable UDP? What makes it so much slower that people have to basically reinvent the wheel?
General/Specialisation
Specialized things are usually better than general purpose things for the thing they are specialized.
Stream / Message
Sending discrete gaming information maps usually better to a message-based paradigm. Sending it through a stream is possible but horribly ineffective. If you want to reliably send a huge amount of data (File transfer), TCP is quite effective. That’s why Bit-torrent use UDP for control messages and TCP for data sending.