Multiplayer time attack
Real physics, turned all the way up.
NetRacer is a free time-attack racer on tracks snapped together from road blocks: loops, wallrides, banked turns, jumps and ice, across a hundred maps from floodlit stadiums to deserts, snow and living rooms where the car is the size of a toy. The car is a full simulation with sprung wheels, a clutch, a sequential gearbox you shift yourself, a V10 that cuts at 20,000 rpm and enough downforce to corner at about two g. The magnitudes are absurd. The relationships between them are all real.
Every run is deterministic to the bit, so the server re-drives your inputs and only a lap it reproduces goes on the board.
Free, and played online: in your browser with nothing to install, or with the desktop download for Windows and Linux. Sign in with Google, pick a name, and your first finish is on the world ladder.
In-engine and uncut. Every shot is a real lap of a campaign map, driven in the game.
Get it, or just press play.
NetRacer is free and played online. In the browser there is nothing to install: press play. The desktop build is the same online game on the same account, with higher frame rates, smoother multiplayer and controller rumble.
Windows
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Unzipping it gives one netracer folder: open it and run NetRacer.exe. The exes are unsigned, so the first launch shows a SmartScreen box: click "More info", then "Run anyway".
Download 26 MBsha256 0b340270d584
Linux
Any 64-bit desktop distribution from about 2022 onwards. Unzipping it gives one netracer folder: open a terminal there and run ./NetRacer. After that first start it is in your app search. Nothing else is installed. The line below does all of it for you.
Download 28 MBsha256 87601ff1baf4
On Linux one line is the whole thing: it downloads the zip, unpacks the game into ~/netracer, and starts it. Paste it into a terminal. It uses curl and unzip, which a desktop Linux almost always has.
cd ~ && curl -fLO https://netracer.alex-wilkinson.ca/downloads/netracer-linux.zip && unzip -oq netracer-linux.zip && rm netracer-linux.zip && cd netracer && ./NetRacerAfter that, starting the game is cd ~/netracer && ./NetRacer. Running the long line again installs a new build over the old one, and your account keeps your progress either way.
One lap. Proven.
NetRacer takes the shape of an arcade racer, a stadium full of loops and jumps and a clock, and puts a simulation-grade car under it. Nothing about the driving is scripted. The car does what a car with these numbers would do, and getting fast means learning what that is.
A car, not a puck
Four sprung wheels on struts with bump and rebound damping, tires that build grip with slip up to a friction ellipse, a clutch, a six-speed sequential box, a limited-slip four-wheel drivetrain, aerodynamic downforce and drag, and a rigid chassis that meets the walls. Understeer, lift-off oversteer and a locked rear axle on a bad downshift all happen because the physics says so.
Air control that is really physics
The wheels are flywheels. Brake in the air and the reaction torque pitches the nose down. Floor it and the nose comes up. There is no air-control cheat: landing a jump flat is a skill made from the same equations that drive the car on the ground.
Fourteen surfaces you can feel
Asphalt, concrete, curb, dirt, gravel, long grass, mown turf, sand, snow, ice, metal, wood, plastic and wall, each with its own grip along and across the road. Water is not one of them: it is a body of water sitting over real ground, so you drive on the road under it while it drags the car and its tires slip. The contrast is turned up on purpose: ice is a different sport, and the road tells you what it is through the wheel.
Every time is proven
The simulation is integer arithmetic, fixed point with no floats anywhere, so it produces the same numbers on every machine. When you cross the line the server re-drives your input stream and compares state hashes. A time it cannot reproduce is never published. A cheat is a divergence, and a divergence is logged, not smoothed over.
Ghosts, medals and splits
Every track carries an author time, and gold, silver and bronze come off it. Your personal best drives beside you as a white ghost with split deltas at every checkpoint, so you always know exactly where the time went.
Cars never collide
Everyone drives the same road at once and nobody can be punted off it. Other cars are live ghosts: you see their lines, their mistakes and their speed through the loop, and the only thing between you and the top of the board is your own lap.
Restart is one key
A run starts after a 1.2 second countdown. Restart is always one key away, and respawn puts you back at the last checkpoint. Nothing else moves the car: leave the map and it stays where it landed, clock running, until you decide.
Tracks from blocks
Road pieces on a 32 meter grid in 8 meter levels snap together end to end in Blender through the NetRacer add-on: straights, turns, banked turns, wallrides, S-bends, tilts, slopes, kickers, landings, hills, bumps and loops, in tech, dirt, sausage, pipe, bobsleigh, platform and pool road types, on any surface. Seams share bit-identical vertices, so there is nothing to fall through.
Special blocks
Turbo and super turbo pads, a rocket booster that floats the car and steers it in the air, an overdrive, a spring and a reset that cancels the lot. Each is a colored pad on the road and a rule in the physics, and every one of them is fair game for the fastest line.
Water, and parts that move
A pool is a real body of water: the car drives on the basin under it while the water drags it and its tires grip less. A mover is a piece of the track that spins, slides or swings, and its pose comes from the race clock alone, so every driver and every replay meets it in exactly the same place at exactly the same moment.
The spec sheet.
One car, the same for everyone. Its parameters are compiled into the game and are not a setting, so a time on the board means the same thing for every driver.
- Engine
- A V10 that idles at 2,300 rpm and cuts at 20,000. Upshifts on the sequential box cut the ignition for 60 milliseconds and need no clutch. Downshifts do not blip the throttle for you: shift down without matching revs and the rear axle locks.
- Gearbox
- Six forward gears and reverse, shifted by you. The auto-clutch only manages launches and the moment around a shift, and you can switch it off and own the pedal.
- Drive
- Four-wheel drive with a limited-slip differential at the front, the center and the rear.
- Grip
- Racing slicks, the rears wider, gripping around three times the load on asphalt and more with downforce. There are no driver aids: no traction control, anti-lock brakes or stability control, so a spinning or locking tire is yours to catch.
- Suspension
- Long-travel struts with light bump damping and heavy rebound, bump stops and droop stops. Dropped from two meters the car lands once and stays down.
- Aerodynamics
- Front and rear downforce that grows with speed squared, extra downforce under braking, and drag that sets the top speed rather than a number in a file.
- Brakes
- Four discs biased to the front, and a handbrake that locks the rears and swings the tail.
- Controls
- Keyboard, gamepad or racing wheel. On a gamepad the left stick steers, the triggers are the pedals and the bumpers shift. A wheel is set up step by step in the game. Every key and button can be rebound.
Your machine drives. The server checks.
Your car is simulated only on your machine, two hundred times a second. What goes to the server is your input stream, nine bytes a tick, and the server relays it to everyone else so their machines can re-drive your car beside theirs. Nothing about where your car is ever crosses the wire.
When you cross the finish, your client claims the time and a server thread re-drives that run from the stored inputs, about half a second of work for a one minute lap. Only a time the re-simulation reproduces, with every state hash matching, is published as verified.
What this buys
- No position cheats
- A client can only send inputs, and inputs are re-driven by everyone. Teleporting, speed hacks and clipping through walls all fail the replay.
- The best laps are kept
- A run is its input stream, so a replay is tiny. The server keeps the replay of every run that places in the top five on a track. A kept replay is never deleted.
- Fair on any machine
- Fixed-point integer maths gives the same result on every processor, so a lap driven on a laptop verifies on the server to the bit.
- A server with no physics
- The server stores and relays inputs and verifies finished runs on a separate thread. It never simulates a car in its main loop.
Snap it together. Drive it.
A track is a Blender file, and building one is picking blocks from a panel and pressing Add. Turn on strict layout and the exporter refuses anything that does not line up. Leave it off and you can tilt a platform by hand or leave a road hanging in the air. Test drive saves, exports and starts the game on your map in one click.
Free. Just press play.
Race in your browser, free, with no install and no launcher, or get the desktop download for Windows and Linux. Either way you sign in with Google, pick a name, and you are on the world ladder, with your campaign progress and settings kept on your account. Find people to race in the Discord, which is where I answer things.
Linux 28 MB and Windows 26 MB, built 2026-11-11
Alex Wilkinson
I build NetRacer on my own. The game is Rust on Fyrox, the open-source engine, and the tracks are Blender files snapped together from road blocks. Every decision comes back to the same rule: real physics, and a lap time you can trust.
I also made ProAim, a shooter about nothing but aim, Nail, the programming language this site is written in, and Simple Universal Language. The rest is at alex-wilkinson.ca.