rdInst Tutorial 11.8 – Using rdECS with Multiplayer
Last Updated: 20th August 2026
Tutorial created using rdInst version 1.53
Note: The ECS Movement system is still a WIP, focus will return to its development once the other rdInst features have been finished.
The rdInst ECS system can be used in multiplayer games – but the ECS data is client based – this means they don’t need to be replicated at all, and collisions don’t need to be predicted.
The important things to synchronize are the spawn times, player locations, and a distributed “heal” of entities transforms (due to the different hardware connected there will be drift on clients from slightly different clocks and slightly different floating point results) – rdInst handles these for you, internally it multicasts a spawn event and spawns at a half-ping corrected time on each client – chase type movement then uses an rdInst internal array of players which is guaranteed to be the same on each client and server by updating any drift over time with distributed healing data, so movement is synchronized on all machines.
By default the synchronizing is turned off – so for accurate multiplayer ECS systems be sure to tick the “Synchronize with Server” option in the rdInst Settings section of the rdInstSettings actor:
Commands like “RemoveEntity” also get multicast to ensure all clients/server keep the same entities.