
Unity Comes to Linux: Experimental Build Now Available - fractalb
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/08/26/unity-comes-to-linux-experimental-build-now-available/
======
yarper
It's an unfortunate title for this post since unity is something altogether
different for a lot of linux users

see: [https://unity.ubuntu.com/about/](https://unity.ubuntu.com/about/)

Though there is a certain appreciable irony in having two totally different
things named unity.

~~~
inversionOf
People who are aware of Ubuntu's Unity will also know that it obviously has
long existed on Linux, so there is no confusion. Simple heuristics made
abundantly clear more than any additional title clarification could.

There are a lot of products in tech, and a huge number of name collisions.
Context (such as the fact that the linked domain is unity3d) saves us all from
having to add caveats and clarifications to every mention. Just as I can talk
about Microsoft Windows without noting that I'm not talking about panes of
glass.

~~~
tsotha
This is all true. The title could have had some more context, though, for
people who have no interest in this particular Unity.

~~~
cwyers
Well, the title has context -- the URL of the site hosting the title,
Unity3D.com, is right next to the title, both on the main page of Hacker News
and on the discussion page.

------
QuantumRoar
Hooray for Linux!

But there's something that has been bothering me for a while about games for
Linux compiled with the Unity SDK.

Does anybody know what kind of dependencies a game written with the Unity SDK
has? I'm pretty clueless about that stuff but I'd still like to know what it
would take to get a game running on a minimal Linux install (like a naked Arch
or Gentoo). Ubuntu obviously comes well equipped for the task but I don't
really care about that.

So where do the graphics come from? Does it need some special libraries apart
from OpenGL? Where do fonts come from? How does it interface with hardware,
i.e. does it need X, or does it come with its own drivers for keyboard, mouse,
gamepad?

I fear that it is necessary to install half of Ubuntu to get the games running
but - as I said - I don't really know anything about that.

~~~
c0nfused
So, having tried to offer support for a game on linux before it's a giant
nightmare. If you don't want to open source you end up with a never ending
support task.

Unity should solve that now. Maybe.

To answer a few specifics with out getting too ragey:

To get real usable 3d you need to be running the proprietary drivers. The
opensource ones at least a year or so ago when I was paying close attention
were uniformly too slow and supported such a limited subset of the specs that
the were usually pointless.

The take away for me was to always assume that the user system is completely
dumb and to ship EVERYTHING. We ended up packaging the kitchen sink to get rid
of the majority of the "I installed this on <nightly build of obscure distro>
and it says it can't find libc" issues.

~~~
pekk
Offering support for a game is a never ending support task. If you aren't
willing to support your users, you aren't ready to publish games. Don't blame
Linux users.

~~~
c0nfused
Linux users aren't the issue. Nor am I attempting to blame them.

The problem is that basically you are always aiming at a moving target of
system configuration when you release. Do you bet that your users have
mechanical disks or SSD? If you aim for the latter you can make different
choices. Windows as an operating system moves pretty slowly compared to the
broader linux ecosystem, your percent users running a particular version of
say DirectX is easy to guess, and easy to predict.

The problem when you move to linux is that the landscape is shifting rapidly.
Everything from the kernel to libraries to what Distro is hot this week change
nightly.OT steal mikepavone's example; In the last few years how many new
families of windows video card drivers have come out? How much change have we
seen in their capabilities? On linux the answer is, frankly, impressive.

This is great for linux, but it makes it hard to reach out to the smaller
percent of the small percent of users who are having an issue and fix their
issues.

The result is that at release you can just let that windows binary sit there
and maybe fix a few bugs that crop up in your code. Your linux binary is more
of a surfing act where things are great, then you are slowing down, and
something breaks, and the whole tower comes down.

Fundamentally, it's why things like Unity are popular. The fewer people on a
team, the less time you have deal with things like compatibility issues.

~~~
SXX
> Your linux binary is more of a surfing act where things are great, then you
> are slowing down, and something breaks, and the whole tower comes down.

This is why you use Steam Runtime and don't worry about that. It's does work
even outside of Steam:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/26pck1/selfcontain...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/26pck1/selfcontained_linux_builds_without_steam/)

------
pluma
I thought it already had Linux support? For example, Wasteland 2 was built
with Unity and works on Linux.

Or are there multiple game engines called Unity (on top of the existing
confusion between the game engine and the Ubuntu thing)?

EDIT: I _think_ the announcement is about Linux support in the SDK, not the
actual software developed with Unity?

~~~
JetSetWilly
The end-products - games - do have linux support. But the support is not that
great, for example the unity engine on linux doesn't seem to support vsync (it
says it does, but it doesn't in practise) which results in horrific and
annoying tearing. It has been like this for well over a year, with no sign of
any urgency to fix it.

It is nice that "linux support" is a bullet point that companies feel is worth
having, but it isn't a significant enough part of their market for them to
make it work without glaring issues, often.

~~~
hacker_9
Not sure why you were downvoted as I've read similar reports that the Linux
builds from Unity are not the best.

Hopefully though now that their main product is expected to work 100%
correctly on Linux, that this will lead to fixes in their Linux compiler.

------
rocky1138
I've been considering switching from Windows 8.1 on my main machine for a
while but not being able to work on my game in Unity3d has held me back. This
might finally put me over the edge.

~~~
tracker1
Windows 10 is pushing me in that direction all by itself. ;-)

It's been about 2 years since my last attempt at Linux for my main desktop
OS... about time for another go at it. Been my HTPC OS for almost a year and a
half (since switching to xbmc/kodi for most playback anyways).

~~~
shocks
Exactly the same situation here.

I jumped over to Fedora and have been pleasantly surprised to find out that
SLI, multi monitor, and sleep work flawlessly. Zero problems so far.

------
bobajeff
"Today’s build is what we call an experimental build; future support is not
yet guaranteed. Your adoption and feedback will help us determine if this is
something we can sustain alongside our Mac and Windows builds."

I think we all know the future of this then.

------
amyjess
Misleading title: should be "Unity Editor Comes to Linux". Unity games have
been running on Linux for a while.

~~~
tracker1
Minor tweak.. "Unity3D Editor Comes to Linux"

------
pdknsk
I am dissapointed in it still requiring 32-bit libraries, like Steam.

    
    
      $ gdebi unity-editor-5.1.0f3+2015082501_amd64.deb 
      ...
      Requires the installation of the following packages: lib32gcc1 lib32stdc++6 libc6-i386

------
andresmanz
Nice, so Unity is finally an option for me. Now it would be nice if the Unreal
editor had official Linux support as well. (I know there's Wine, but it didn't
work too well for me.)

~~~
wjoe
The UE4 editor can be built for Linux, though they don't have official stable
builds yet.

[https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Building_On_Linux](https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Building_On_Linux)

~~~
solidpy
Are they comparable? I thought UE was geared towards FPS while Unity was more
generalist.

~~~
AimHere
Both are general purpose engines and can be put towards a wide variety of game
genres. Out of the box, UE4's editor comes with about half a dozen templates
(FPS, top-down, side-scrolling platformer etc) for rudimentary intro projects.

Unreal Engine is somewhat harder to use, but it's graphics engine is a bit
closer to the cutting edge - it's the go-to engine for AAA devs these days.
Unity's main user base (for people who use it to make games - some use it for
academic ends, or for tech demos) tends to be the indie game scene.

They do the same job, but differ in the technical aspects and ease-of-use, and
business model (though both are aiming to lower the barriers to making games),
and they tend to cater to different segments of the market.

------
jarcane
_grumbles something about developers saying "Linux" when they mean "only
supported on Ubuntu"_

~~~
scrollaway
What would you have them do? Support it on every single distribution out
there? They pick a mainstream one and run with it - I get it. It's normal.
It's sad, but you can't blame _them_ ; you gotta blame the ecosystem we're in.

I'm an Arch Linux guy. I _strongly_ dislike both Ubuntu and Canonical, on
technical, political and ethical grounds. But I get it.

And you know, a huge part of the problem is that "we", as the Linux community,
have no direct interest in pushing compatibility between distributions. It
takes a _lot_ of effort, a _lot_ of political reach, and the distros will just
run with their own thing a few months later anyway, nullifying the efforts.

Besides... have you seen what happens when people are actually successful at
pushing compatibility? Have you _seen_ the shit people throw at Lennart/RH for
Systemd? Why would anyone ever want to play that game?

Anyway, not to detract from the topic - it's fantastic news. Unity3d is huge
in the game development world and this is a big win.

~~~
masklinn
> What would you have them do? Support it on every single distribution out
> there?

No, say that Unity comes to _Ubuntu_.

~~~
baldfat
Ubuntu is Linux, I don't use Ubuntu. I use mostly OpenSUSE/SUSE and sometimes
Arch or a Redhat version and if I must Ubuntu or Debian. It will work in Linux
just wish we had a solid second tier desktop Distro.

Gone are the days when distros decided if something worked or didn't. Thanks
to things like SystemD this will continue down that road (Ducks). Also hoping
we finally do package management in a elegant modern way soon and not like we
are right now.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_Thanks to things like SystemD this will continue down that road (Ducks)._

How? systemd touches a completely different layer. The main thing that might
prevent ELF interoperability across distributions is if the distro has some
esoterically configured binutils/glibc toolchain and the provided application
is a dynamically linked binary blob.

~~~
baldfat
SystemD pretty much takes over the core of the OS. This has helped the trend
of Distros being interoperational with each other. This is why some people
HATE SystemD.

Before SystemD we had init scripts in our thousands of packages. Each package
system would have different init systems and procedures. This is one of the
big reasons why things were not inter-operational between distros. This is why
Arch and Debian among others distros jumped off their old init systems and
adopted SystemD.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
The package systems never had init system integration. What some PMs did was
they ran procedures in the postinstall scripts to do things like update SysV
symlink farms. In Debian, this was done by sysv-rc and in RPM-based distros,
chkconfig or something similar.

They're completely orthogonal tools.

And no, it was hardly a "big reason" why distros weren't interoperable.
Initscripts were rarely supplied by upstream vendors and frequently written
downstream. Then many other people didn't use them at all, but wrote
runscripts for some flavor of daemontools in about 4 lines or something.

The main reason has always boiled down to the toolchain. One proposed way to
get around it was fat ELF binaries, but that effort got metaphorically
curbstomped by the Linux community. Universal package managers aren't
supported for political/branding reasons.

In any event, systemd doesn't help with this.

~~~
baldfat
> The package systems never had init system integration

Never said integration saying packages have scripts to init themselves and
that was different based on your distro.

Don't know why you feel the need to correct a point that distros are becoming
more and more alike and that systemd is one of the elements that has helped
this? Anywaysssss SystemD is the standard now for most of Linux and I am
hoping for MORE standardization.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Distros are undeniably becoming more alike thanks to systemd, but from this
premise does not in any way follow that package interoperability will be
improved, which was the topic at hand.

(To be pedantic, there is no "standardization" so to speak of. It's more like
an informal fiat than anything.)

~~~
baldfat
BUT deamons are now standardized on how to init them into systemd.

------
jestinjoy1
This came just in time when I was thinking of switching to Mac. Blender game
engine has features but not upto the mark to compete with game engines like
Unity. The python scripting in Blender is good.

~~~
emsy
Unity has been available for Mac for quite some time.

------
rrhyne
Personally, I'd rather they spend time making webgl production ready to ensure
Chrome player support.

~~~
penetrarthur
But the news say that this is Unity3d editor - program you make games in, not
the game.

~~~
kleiba
S/he's talking about the HTML exporter.

------
yellowapple
Yay. Nore more having to run it in Wine :)

------
billconan
for me, Unity is too expensive. I hope Unreal can do the same. there is an
unofficial build instruction for unreal.

~~~
solidpy
I thought it was free until you started making an amount of money that made
buying a license a non-issue.

~~~
AimHere
That sounds like Unreal. Unity has a free version and a pro version, the
latter is either a subscription-based one, or a one-off payment of $1500 or
similar, which does sound awfully cheap to me.

~~~
unsignedint
They've had a bit of capability difference before. From the version 5, they've
changed their model so aside from mandatory Personal Edition splash screen,
the engine is identical but they do offer support and external feature for
their paid version. (And they have $100000 revenue/funding limit to license
Personal Edition.[1])

[1] [http://unity3d.com/legal/eula](http://unity3d.com/legal/eula)

------
x5n1
yay!

------
gcb0
problem with games is that they are only good if multiplayer.

and it's only good multiplayer if you can't cheat.

that means every dumb game system rush to try to run as root. as you can see
with steam.

then after they have that excuse they also use that new power to enforce DRM.
as you can see with steam.

and cheaters continue to cheat. but now you have malware.

running games in Linux is easy. heck you've done it on windows, you can make
it on Linux with better docs and apis. the problem with Linux gaming is
catering to users that don't have their heads up their buts. that is the real
problem, and nobody sees the monetary incentive.

that said, true Linux gaming holy grail will be achieved when you can run a
windows vm with full 3d support. period.

~~~
simoncion
> that means every dumb game system rush to try to run as root. as you can see
> with steam.

You are tragically misinformed:

    
    
      user@host:~$ find ~/.local/share/Steam/ -perm -4000
      user@host:~$ find ~/.local/share/Steam/ -user root
      user@host:~$ find /bin -perm -4000
      /bin/ping6
      /bin/ping
      /bin/su
      /bin/fusermount
      /bin/ntfs-3g
      /bin/umount
      /bin/mount
      user@host:~$ find /bin -user root | wc -l
      201
      user@host:~$ ps aux | grep -i steam  | grep root | wc -l
      0

------
gpvos
It seems to be some kind of game development platform.

~~~
viewer5
Yep, Unity is a 2d and 3d game engine. It's pretty nice. I used it in a couple
of class group projects in college.

It's often compared alongside the Unreal editor, which I unfortunately haven't
taken for a spin yet.

~~~
bloodorange
I have used both Unreal DK and Unity 3d. On any day, I'll pick Unreal based
technology over Unity3d. Unity 3d was a total pain in the neck and is more
suitable for art-heavy and relatively less programming kind of games.

Unreal is far more mature as a platform and you can do a lot more with it.
(The code of the internals sucks a bit though).

------
werber
I got excited and thought Canonical was finally getting close to making Unity
a pleasant experience, but I guess this is cool too.

