UNITY FOR GAMES
Choosing the Right Netcode
Every multiplayer game has to account and solve for inherent network-related challenges that impact the game experience, such as latency, packet loss, and scene management, and games solve these challenges in a variety of ways.
Finding the right solution depends on a game’s genre, the scale of its players and networked objects, competitiveness, and other aspects, like how much control is needed over the networking layer.
Different scenarios require different netcode solutions. There’s no perfect, one-size-fits all solution for all kinds of games and experiences. That’s why developers need to evaluate the options and decide which netcode solution – or combination of solutions – best suits a title’s needs. In many cases, they may also need to extend or customize existing netcode.
Our team has gathered feedback about some of the most widely used third-party netcode solutions, and we’ve created a decision tree to help guide you through the process of deciding which framework might work best for you.
To create these tools, we gathered and analyzed data from three sources:
- A survey of over 200 Unity users that asked for information about their experiences with specific netcode frameworks
- Over 20 in-depth interviews with users actively shipping multiplayer games with Unity
- Learnings from prototypes we built with MLAPI, DarkRift 2, Mirror, and Photon Quantum.