Unity Editor Lands An Experimental Build For Game Developers On Linux

For what it's worth, one of the The Maker's Eden team used a private build of this for the recent Ludum Dare

Im interested in using this. Two questions though, firstly how is the payment model handled if you make a game and release it on Steam ? And secondly, they are not supporting vulkan ( yes maybe in a few years ) but working on improving their Ogl / Egl support is it worth waiting for Unreals UDK native editor instead ?

Unity doesn't have revenue sharing - you just use the personal or professional edition as appropriate and distribute your game how/where you want - free and open-source, free-to-play, on Steam/GOG/appstores, whatever.

Vulkan will almost certainly be supported, once there is a Vulkan to support. ;-)

Vulkan will almost certainly be supported, once there is a Vulkan to support. ;-)

They said not. But maybe the position has changed ?

Ahm... they did show experimental vulkan support at SIGGRAPH 2015 .... so I bet it won't be "in a few years" but quite soon after the Vulkan spec is final...


Last edited by STiAT on 26 August 2015 at 12:08 pm UTC

Vulkan will almost certainly be supported, once there is a Vulkan to support. ;-)

They said not. But maybe the position has changed ?

They never said they wouldn't, but it will come later. The API hasn't even been released yet, can't expect them to support it.

Vulkan will almost certainly be supported, once there is a Vulkan to support. ;-)

They said not. But maybe the position has changed ?

Who is "they"? I think it might have been me doing a one sentence remark during siggraph talk, that some sites picket up. All I said was "we aren't actively doing Vulkan just yet, but keeping a close eye on it". All this means is that serious, actual coding did not start yet (nothing more, nothing less).

For what it's worth, one of the The Maker's Eden team used a private build of this for the recent Ludum Dare

Yus! And I have given them feedback on issues/findings. In general it works well, except a few crashes and UI goofiness in places. They are aware of some of these, but I trust my fellow Linuxers will continue to submit useful constructive feedback/bug reports.

I'd bet you'll be lucky to find a single "big" cross platform game engine that doesn't support Vulkan in a couple of years.

STEAM Ubuntu FTW!

Thank you for your contribution. You should also consider posting "First!!!111" preferably but not necessarily as the first comment in every single thread.

This is awesome sauce! This also officially means the Unity team have one-uped the Unreal team. UE4 still doesn't have an installer for Linux right now, and the compiling process is very heavy and usually hit-or-miss for quite a number of folks.

I'm downloading this beauty right now :D

This is awesome sauce! This also officially means the Unity team have one-uped the Unreal team. UE4 still doesn't have an installer for Linux right now, and the compiling process is very heavy and usually hit-or-miss for quite a number of folks.

It's cool and all to get the Unity editor, but let's not spread FUD here. The compiling process is as complicated as one line in the terminal to start the compile script, and has always compiled with no issues on my Ubuntu setup (an anecdotal argument, I know, but still).
From there you could always make a DEB out of it, if you like. Sure, it's no installer yet but it's not a tough job to install it on a supported distro.

It's also tempting to mention the relative quality/capability of the two engines, but let's leave that discussion for later. :)


Last edited by Beamboom on 26 August 2015 at 1:42 pm UTC

Vulkan will almost certainly be supported, once there is a Vulkan to support. ;-)

They said not. But maybe the position has changed ?

They never said they wouldn't, but it will come later. The API hasn't even been released yet, can't expect them to support it.

Who is "they"? I think it might have been me doing a one sentence remark during siggraph talk, that some sites picket up. All I said was "we aren't actively doing Vulkan just yet, but keeping a close eye on it". All this means is that serious, actual coding did not start yet (nothing more, nothing less).

Ah probably that, Admittedly it was a while ago

Unity 5.2 right now doesn't take full advantage of the new APIs yet but there is a lot of code work happening. Soon the Unity developers plan to have more clean-ups, threading for all platforms, and various DirectX 12 / Metal improvements. However, in regards to Unity supporting Vulkan, the last slide mentions, "..we're not doing Vulkan just yet, but keeping it in mind."

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unity-Next-Gen-APIs

It was phoronix, so sometimes that can site can be read off the back of a cigarette packet. But yes I read the "not doing" and "keeping in mind" to mean maybe in a couple of years.

I must of read into it wrong, there has been quite a bit of negativity towards Unitys performance on Linux ( steam forums and such ) also some unity official press didn’t come across glowing about Linux either last year.

It started to get a bit of crummy name pre 5 but that seems to have calmed down a bit as things are working faster and better. Im interested in purchasing the pro version but I shall wait a bit longer for UDK and try both, I used to be good a making stuff on the old Unreal engine back in the early 2000's ^_^


Last edited by on 26 August 2015 at 3:12 pm UTC

It's cool and all to get the Unity editor, but let's not spread FUD here. The compiling process is as complicated as one line in the terminal to start the compile script, and has always compiled with no issues on my Ubuntu setup (an anecdotal argument, I know, but still).

It's not my intention to create FUD, the process for compiling is most definitely not a one liner! (grab dependencies, run setup.sh, GenerateProjectFiles, make Slateviewer, then make the final UE4) |

I made a short tutorial on my small blog, and I usually get e-mails from others regarding the process.

Quite a few are successful, and quite a few are not. I've been successful occasionally, and unsuccessfully occasionally and that is the current scenario with UE4.

It's an amazing engine visually no doubt, but healthy rivalry is a good thing. UE4 was ahead of Unity, now Unity seems to have jumped up front. It's good for all of us ^_^

Unity3D For Linux? Sign My Ass Up.

Looks like I'm getting back in Game Development.

Vulkan will almost certainly be supported, once there is a Vulkan to support. ;-)

They said not. But maybe the position has changed ?

they said. NOT YET. and there was pretty darn nice explanation why for anyone who knows how development works

main problem they are facing is not just porting to dx12/vulkan, but rather the fact their engine is single threaded which is against the design of both, dx12 AND vulkan.

now, just consider for a second. if you need to rework innards to fit to new era and those innards are your work. what sense would it make to already start with 2 implementations? NONE. your development would just be slowed down since you'd have to maintain 2 similar implementations of unfinished product. now add to the fact that one of the 2 is not finalized yet, you also added another brake to your progress since your second implementation can require more work if it changed

also, if you looked up on NVidia presentation of next gen APIs at SIGGRAPH... porting between dx12 and vulkan is more or less straight forward and they both require EXACT same changes (at least those that matter in my understanding of the talk) in Unity engine to even start producing results which would compete with previous iteration


Last edited by vulture on 26 August 2015 at 4:04 pm UTC

Very very awesome. Downloading now as well...

healthy rivalry is a good thing. UE4 was ahead of Unity, now Unity seems to have jumped up front. It's good for all of us ^_^

By all means, it is indeed. These are days almost unimaginative a few years ago.

I do hear about a lot of Unity games with bad performance, but then there are a ton of Unity games. I've played plenty of Unity games that preformed very well (Assault Android Cactus anyone?), it depends on the developer. Hopefully the editor being on Linux will make it that much easier for devs to do some proper bug testing & editing on the platform :)

I took a look at the editor, seems fancy, but probably way over my head. I'll keep toying with Moai for now ^^

This is good, however the Unity3D engine does deliver bad performance for quite a few games attempting too much with it, for example the new Carmageddon game, and even Wasteland 2 had issues (which should be fixed in Dir Cut version). Unity team really does need to get multi-threading working along with DX12/Vulkan, it will only mean GREAT things for them if they do!