Greetings TUx Enthusiasts,
In November of 2016, we announced that we were releasing a Linux Public Beta, which was a native build of Tower Unite for Linux. This version had some bugs and glitches, but for the most part worked well enough for our Linux players to enjoy Tower Unite.
However, a couple months ago, we made some changes to the engine, and unfortunately this broke our Linux Public Beta. The game would get to a point where it would load to the main menu, but then refuse to load any of the maps. As we’re a small team, the Linux Public Beta wasn’t the highest of priority, so it sat as it was.
Fast forward a couple months, and Valve announces a new version of Steam Play, which is bundled with a modified version of Wine named Proton. With Proton, Windows games can be run on Linux, without the game having to be packaged for Linux in the first place. The one caveat is that Steam Play only works with games that don’t have a native Linux build, which at the time of release, Tower Unite did.
Today, we took the dive and deleted our broken Linux Public Beta branch, will allowed Steam Play to be used with Tower Unite. The results were very exciting.
We conducted the test on a Linux machine running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS with NVIDIA’s Proprietary Drivers (Version 390.77). The machine sports an Intel Core i5-3570k, 16GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980.
The image below is with all settings set to Ultra.
Most of the issues that were found during the Linux Public Beta are gone when playing the native Windows version using Steam Play. In our tests, there doesn’t appear to be any issues with effects, the ocean shader, VOIP, Steam Cloud, or the Media Player. Even Workshop works without any issue.
In fact, one of the only issues we noticed, as that in the Plaza, none of the sounds are distanced based, and due to this, the player will constantly hear all of the casino games running at once, which as it’s very annoying, we suggest turning down the Effects volume while in the Plaza.
While everything works, results may vary, and there is a performance hit due to how Proton operates. Still, it has a major advantage over the Linux Public Beta, in that it works, and doesn’t require a separate build to be created, allowing Linux players to get updates at the same time as Windows players.
Here’s a small guide on how to take advantage of Steam Play.
First, make sure that you are enrolled in the Steam Client beta. You can check this by clicking Steam -> Settings and clicking Account. Once there, if "Beta Participation: " says “Not Participating”, click on the button “Change…” and select “Steam Beta Update”.
Once Steam restarts, click Steam -> Settings and click on Steam Play. Make sure to check both “Enable Steam Play for supported titles” and “Enable Steam Play for all titles”. You also want to change the Compatibility Tool from “Proton 3.7-8” to “Proton 3.16-4”. This is important, as “Proton 3.7-8” will cause the game to fatal error when the Main Menu is displayed, and result in the game crashing.
Steam will restart again. After this, you should now be able to install and play Tower Unite without any other changes.
We hope you enjoy playing Tower Unite on Linux once again.
