// the take
An official Unity Technologies sample showing how to build a multiplayer kart racer with Netcode for Entities — their ECS-based networking stack. It's aimed at Unity devs who already know DOTS/ECS and want a real, non-trivial reference for ghost replication, physics prediction, and lobby/matchmaking patterns rather than a toy 'hello netcode' demo.
It's a genuinely full-stack example: baking, ISystem, Jobs, Burst, Unity Physics with ghost collision all shown working together in a real game loop, not isolated snippets. Using a racing game as the vehicle (pun intended) forces it to demonstrate deterministic physics prediction and reconciliation under netcode, which is the hard part most ECS netcode tutorials skip. It also wires in the new Input System and Multiplayer Play Mode tooling, so you get a template for local multi-client testing without needing multiple machines.
Version pinning is a mess: the README requires 6000.2.11f1 but says it was tested on 6000.1.15f1 — on different major Unity 6 releases, which tells you this sample is actively chasing engine churn rather than settled on a stable base. It depends on the Vehicle package at v0.1, an explicitly experimental Unity package, so the car handling/physics layer can break on any engine update outside this repo's control. Cloning it is non-trivial — Git LFS is mandatory and a zip download won't work, which is friction for anyone just wanting to skim the netcode code. Unity's own known-issues note admits build times are inflated because all shader variants compile instead of just the ones in use, and there's a Vivox voice chat dependency, which ties you to another external service if you want that feature working.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →