Hello there, yesterday I embarked on a new to me Linux adventure (Bazzite for about 6 months) and I would like your thoughts on how I executed acquiring UE4.27 as well as your suggestions or experiences in doing this or something similar.
A friend of mine suggested that I check out UE since I was getting pretty proficient at Halo Infinite’s forge mode which involves a lot of visual scripting and logic. So I went to check out where to download the engine and found out that the epic launcher is not available on Linux systems. Okay no problem I’m sure you can just download the engine by itself and just miss out on fab integration or something. Sure enough that is the case for getting the latest UE 5 something.
I am using a GTX 1080 founders but I figured I’d give it a go and maybe I can develop something that will work on my GPU infrastructure without ray tracing and whatever else is new. Nope, it crashes pretty soon after entering the editor. No matter, I can just just get the last version of the engine from a few years ago and should work better.
Turns out the only way to access older versions of UE is through Epic’s Github page on old branches of the build. The only way to access those old branches is by linking your github account to your Epic account. Regrettably I do so as I was not able to find another way to get 4.27.
I then download the code and compile the app which takes almost 3 hours through Konsole. To launch the editor o have to go into the engine folder, the binaries folder, then the Linux folder, then navigate through hundreds of files to find “UE4Editor” executable to launch every time I want to launch the editor.
There has got to be an easier way right? I’m thankful that eventually I found a working method to try out the engine but boy oh boy did I receive some ridicule from friends (who while are technically savvy and work in IT themselves) who are on windows lol.
Please Linux wizards, give me your compile spells
TL:DR Ended up having to compile the app with Konsole after connecting GitHub and Epic games accounts.
Have you thought about giving Godot a try?
Its much more suited to your PC’s specs, and can be downloaded/ran through a much easier methods like flatpaks.
Create a link.
Last time I looked, you do have to compile the editor, they don’t provide binaries for Linux. If it compiles and runs, that’s pretty impressive. Complex programs like that usually give a lot more trouble.
Thanks for the link idea, added it to places in dolphin.
Good to know I got off easy on my first try. Are there compiler programs or is Konsole as good of a tool as any?
Konsole doesn’t do any compiling, it’s just a terminal emulator to give you a command line. It’s as good as any, I use it because it works. I don’t need fancy features.
Understood, appreciate the explanation :)
Essentially yeah, that’s the workflow. You can obviously set up a shortcut to the editor, as well as having .uproject files open with the editor as the default app, which will save you some time.
You’ll probably want to eventually figure out why UE5 is crashing (maybe just force lumen/nanite off to see if that’s it) as you cannot compile from Linux to Windows in 4.27 (If you’re looking to eventually share your projects), I believe this is only possible by using wine in ~5.7+, and there’s a Fab plugin for linux but it is only available in the 5.x versions of the engine (if you end up needing Fab for either content or more game template examples).
Good to know, future complies will be done before bed next time lol.
That hurdle with sharing projects could eventually come up, will look into that, thanks.
