The surprise successor to the highly praised indie RPG adventure game UNDERTALE called DELTARUNE has been unofficially ported to Linux by a fan through clever hacks.
DELTARUNE, or rather its first chapter, was released with a cryptic announcement on http://www.deltarune.com for free on Windows and Mac but a Linux version was sadly not released at launch. However, thanks to a DELTARUNE fan on Reddit, we now have unofficial native port of the game.
The Reddit user JohnWatson78 posted their port on the DELTARUNE subreddit and afterwards updated their post with instructions on how they managed to make the game run on Linux.
Essentially, they extracted the officially released version of the game, made sure the files were in the correct places and in lowercase letters and found a compatible GameMaker "runner" executable that could then load the game assets. The main issue was finding a suitable runner file by browsing existing Linux GameMaker ports. You can naturally find the more detailed step-by-step guide in JohnWatson78's Reddit post.
So, to clarify, this is an actual native port and doesn't rely on utilizing Wine or other compatibility modes, just feeding the game data to a version of the game engine that can understand said data.
This is a very cool thing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, and without further spoilers, DELTARUNE is a very cool game and UNDERTALE fans hungering for more content will surely be pleased to be able to play the game. Also, running the Windows version in Wine, while doable, causes some small issues like the game running at 2x the normal speed unless specifically restricted to 30 FPS (I thought I was just bad at the game but at least my next playthrough will be easy). This issue should not affect the native port.
However, another prospect of this port is that we now have a detailed process to follow in order to make future fan-ports of GameMaker games with relatively little effort. While we may wish that the devs themselves handled this part for us (and I still hope Toby Fox makes an official port), it's a fact of life that some developers will never make a proper port. Now we at least have a way to make such games potentially run on Linux on our own. And who knows, perhaps the community being able to pull off a port on their own will convince the developers to release an official port in time.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: LeopardAfaik Toby Fox doesn't know coding thus doesn't know packaging as well if it is not provided by tool he uses.
So how did he release Undertale for Linux?
Afaik community helped him to do that.
Quoting: Avehicle7887Windows Unity games can be converted in a similar way if matched with Linux exe that is same or close enough version, it may not work for all games though.It can be done indeed (relatively) easy if the game in question has the OpenGL/Vulkan renderer enabled, and if there's no crazy middle-ware involved.
Unfortunately, after the Unity 5 release, the OpenGL renderer was removed as a enabled_by_default option. I'm not sure what is the situation today, I haven't done it in while. So you have to hunt for titles where the developer enabled OpenGL, or Mac/OpenGL titles. And yes, the Linux exec must be the same version as the game uses.
Some of the titles working this way, here's a playlist if interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDzx5WP-fIA&list=PLLao81MHwh1PQKIjAe5S8c_Qvv68vH-it
The Silent Age
Hektor
Blameless
The Uncertain: Episode 1
Dear Esther: Landmark Edition
Dead Effect 1 & 2
There are many others that I can't remember now.
A nice touch is that you can often use the 64bit Linux exec and have a boost of performance that even the original Windows doesn't have (for reasons that I don't know, devs keep releasing 32bit-only versions).
And yes, you can do that even for native games if they have only a 32bit version.
In all these case I've sent emails/messages to game developers showing them their games running on Linux and asking for native versions, but none of them responded.
To give credit, I have seen this method first time detailed on a blog of our friend/fellow reader here Seegras: http://seegras.discordia.ch/Blog/windows-unity-games-on-linux/
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