In November 2022, we started a side project in my company, a video game called Cuprum 2929. Because I love Linux (being a full user since 2009) and I’m the owner of the company, I made the bold decision to fully develop it on Linux. While this is largely true, I have to put a disclaimer now that we are not building everything on the Linux OS, but about 95%, which is still impressive in my opinion.
In the article below, I’ll discuss in detail our choices, our setup, how we helped some parts of the ecosystem support Linux better, and why some work couldn’t be done on Linux. I’m also going to share some tips and tricks that I discovered myself to make the experience better and unlock some features that may not be available on the UE Linux build, and how we get the most out of it.
As is the case for a lot of things on a Linux OS, there are multiple ways to do this. If you are committed to developing your video game on Linux, I’m going to suggest the best thing that worked for us so far. If you want to experiment yourself, you can follow the unreal engine guide, which would be redundant to repeat here.
After we tried a few ways, the best flow for us (which is going to make more and more sense the more you progress in this article) is to build our own Unreal Engine fork. To get access to the Unreal Engine source code, as described in the previously linked guide, you can also fork it.
Because the Unreal Engine project is huge in size, we only have a copy of the latest commit (git clone –depth=1 ) . But why go to all that effort?
