Linux Public Beta

Announcements
1

Greetings TUx Enthusiasts,

We are pleased to announce to our Linux users that we are releasing a beta version of the Linux client for Tower Unite! Users will need to opt-in to the beta branch on Steam to download the client and play it.

To opt-in to the beta, right click on Tower Unite in Steam, go to Properties, go to the Betas Tab, and select from the dropdown “linuxbeta - Linux Public Beta”.

First off, we want to stress that while we are providing this client to Linux users, we offer no guarantee at this time that everything will work. There will be issues, there will be crashes, there will be problems. This should be treated as a beta test. Due to this, we are not advertising on our store page that we have a Linux client until we bring it up to our standards.

While most functionality should work exactly how it does on Windows, there are many graphical issues in this release. These issues seem to be localized to our effects systems. Certain maps such as Alpine and Midori are affected more than the other maps due to this issue.

At this point in time, the Linux and Mac OS X clients are low priority. Closer to the end of the Early Access period we will shift our focus towards improving these clients. There are no planned dates for a Mac OS X beta at this time.

Now to get into the more technical details. The Tower Unite Linux client was tested on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS using a Nvidia GTX 980 with the proprietary Nvidia drivers version 367.57. Your results may vary. Running Tower Unite with the “-opengl4” flag may improve or degrade the visuals.

Due to some of the graphical issues in the Linux Client, we recommend the following settings to minimize visual artifacts in the game:

  • Screen Mode -> “Windowed”
  • Effects Quality -> “Low”
  • Ocean Quality -> “Potato”

Here is the list of things that we can confirm are broken in the current versions of the Linux client.

  • Effects. Some textures may be multicolored or just blacked out entirely. Some objects with glare don’t render correctly and can make some maps like Midori unplayable. Alpine also suffers from this with the snow particle issues. We recommend changing your “Effects Quality” to “Low” to mitigate this issue.

  • Ocean. The ocean shader we use for the Lobby, Condo, and the upcoming Treasure Cove minigolf map does not currently have OpenGL renderer support. Due to this, the water will have a grey default texture applied to it. We recommend changing your “Ocean Quality” to “Potato” as this shader does work with OpenGL.

  • Fullscreen and Borderless Fullscreen. While these settings are functional, there are issues that arise when alt-tabbing out of the game, which can even cause the game to crash. We recommend that you play in Windowed Mode if you alt-tab frequently.

  • VOIP. Voice chat is completely non functional in the Linux client. Linux clients will see that people are talking, but no audio will be transferred.

  • Midori. The Midori map for the Ball Race gamemode functions perfectly fine, but the glare and graphical issues, including blinding lights, may make the map impossible to play. Playing Tower Unite with the “-opengl4” flag may mitigate this issue, but only on this map alone.

  • Steam Cloud. Steam Cloud currently does not work with the Linux clients. Linux users will need to transfer and backup their condos and persona files manually at this time. We’d advise just to disable Steam Cloud in the game’s Properties -> Updates -> Steam Cloud settings on Steam.

  • Media Player. While playing back video, there will be a intense flicker from the screen, and some videos won’t play video at all, but they will have audio.

Understanding all this above, we invite our Linux fans to give the beta a try, and to enjoy Tower Unite on Linux.

10 Likes
2

O boi the hype train suddenly arrived

2 Likes
3

Get ready for some linux and windows cross-play, just like microsoft studio’s xbox one & windows 10 games’s cross-play feature

4

Reminds me of the cool trailer Valve made when they release OSX support:

@macdguy @Caboose700. will you guys accept crash dumps related to the Linux beta (once they occur)?

2 Likes
5

itshappening.gif

6

1 Like
7

Yes but be advised, the Linux client isn’t our top priority at the moment so it may be slow for us to react to it.

5 Likes
8

This announcement is so TUbular.

9

Have you considered putting a password on it so only people aware of that (as in: People who read this thread) can test the build?

Do you use the Steam Runtime for interdistributional compatibility?

10

The only reason it’s in a separate branch is because we don’t feel comfortable having it on the main branch because it might give the impression it’s the best we can do. We want anyone whose on Linux to be able to play the game, and the notion of just opting into the branch will let them know that this isn’t the final representation of our Linux client.

11

So i just tried it and i have some issues.

The first time it started it worked fine but it was in windowed mode so i went to the settings and changed to “Borderless Fullscreen” and after that the mouse stopped working. Have tried to change the Config/DefaultGameUserSettings.ini file by editing the “FullscreenMode” and “LastConfirmedFullscreenMode” to “0”, “1” and “-1” instead of “2” but that didn’t work so i don’t know how to revert that.

Some help so i can actually test in-game would be nice.

EDIT: Was able to fix it by setting -WINDOWED as a startup argument. Joining the lobby eats up my memory and it’s now at 4500MB ram usage so there’s some memory leak for sure. I then forced quit it since i only have 8GB of ram. Will be back reporting on trying to join condo/minigames

EDIT2: Hosting a Minigolf (Altitude) game alone seems to work fine, 1300MB of ram usage.

EDIT3: There are some minor graphical artifacts on Altitude, not annoying or anything since it only seems to be with some particle effect in the background (skybox?). I am using the latest nvidia driver on Arch Linux.

EDIT4: Ballrace GLXY in multiplayer seemed to work, but also had graphical artifacts which made it kind of hard to play.

12

So what you’re saying is:

It supports UbunTU?

3 Likes
13

I mean, I guess that TU.

6 Likes
14

stop

15

As I expressed in Discord, thank you!

Because of this beta release, I deleted my Win7 VM which was only used for TU and took up nearly 80GB of my precious SSD.

The only issue I noticed with fullscreen (borderless) was the cursor offset after losing and regaining focus, as I suspect was already known given the mention of alt-tab issues in the announcement. Switching to windowed and back resolves it until the next time. No crashes even when frequently changing focus and great frame rate with very minor freeze when loading in.

The graphical glitches, as expected, are the most obvious issue. Fortunately, they don’t impact playability much and I won’t complain aside from pointing out what I’m not sure is already known. I’m just happy to have the Linux client, which is far more playable than running it in VMware (didn’t work at all in WINE or VirtualBox). The glitchy glare/glow effect sometimes makes it difficult to see what’s near them, such as the screen it’s emanating from. That seems to improve a little by increasing effects quality, at the expense of causing some effect textures (e.g. player queues) to glitch in the manner described in the announcement. I may have settled on Medium effects for the best balance.

Keep up the good work! As a Linux user, while I would like to see quick fixes to those issues, I totally understand if fixing them takes a back seat until the end of EA. As long as things don’t get much worse, I’ll be more than happy to play.

16

I play all my games in a VM. I use KVM as the VM host. It supports a functionality called PCI-Passthrough, which allows you to passthrough a PCI(e) device to a VM. That way I got a native Fedora 25 installation running along with a WIndows 10 VM. And the performance is great!

17

I have an Intel 6700k, GTX 1060, 16GB DDR4, ran the VM off a Samsung 850 EVO. The main issue was that TU would freeze for ~1-5 seconds every time I turned, as though it had to load all the models/textures for everything entering my field of view. It was very annoying and caused some of the games to be difficult to play if not completely unplayable. I had looked into KVM a while back for Android emulation and determined it to be more trouble than it’s worth for how little I needed it. I much prefer to settle for the rendering glitches in the native client in order to get a smooth frame rate (average about 100fps if I turn off vsync, zero hiccups noticed after the initial load).

I don’t see much reason to play games in a VM these days, except for the very few that aren’t native or don’t work well in WINE. Of the 505 games in my Steam library, 343 have Linux support. Of the roughly half dozen I play that don’t support Linux, they work very well if not flawlessly in WINE. TU was the only game in years that I found the need to play in a VM, and even then it was thankfully only for a few months. I’m not saying playing in a VM is wrong, just rather inefficient in most cases and I suggest giving native or WINE a try. Even if the VM performance is on par with native (hard for me to believe even with KVM), you’re still storing an entire separate OS and allowing it to soak up additional memory, CPU, GPU, and I/O resources for its own operation. Sorry for the rant, but accepting compromises like dual-boot, VM or WINE, especially when native clients already exist, is why many developers don’t bother to make native Linux/Mac clients, and that makes me a sad penguin.

1 Like
18

PRAISE
\o/

19

This topic was automatically closed after 7 days. New replies are no longer allowed.