[LAUNCHER] Appeal to Epic Games: Linux Launcher/Marketplace support

[Yaakuro]

Hello Epic Team and Tim Sweeney

Please. Help the GNU/Linux (gnux) community and please support the Launcher. So many people asking in the #ue4linux channel about it and we are always sad to give them a disappointing answer. There are already so many Threads/Posts about this topic in the forums too but it seems not really getting clearly heard. We get always the same answer: Not the priority atm.
Well, yes and we all know about market-share and about profit etc. but isn't the philosophy behind making Unreal Engine 4 "free" the freedom for everyone having the opportunity to use it and make awesome stuff and at the end everyone benefits and yes especially Epic Games. There are so many possible customer you seem not to care or see maybe.

We know that some people having issues when they just hear the word GNU and/or LINUX. Why? Practically it is just another OS which has the potential to become useful for everyone in one way or another. The community helped already so much to make the UE4 Editor possible on gnux. So please can you help the community in the manner.

If not the launcher, why not making the Marketplace Website so that the content is downloadable? Or how about making the launcher so that it can run with wine? Or better, if there are some parts of the Launcher which makes difficulties (on gnux) I am sure the community will help you with everything they can if Epic doesn't have the time to invest in it.

I believe in the awesomeness of Epic because you did already so many cool things. Please amaze us more, with the launcher.

Sorry for my humble way of writing.

Best regards,

[Peter_M]

I 2nd this, the more systems that the engine can work on the greater its flexibility and market-share.

[siebencorgie]

I would love this too... I am 95% of my time on my Linux System, but I have to switch to Windows every time I want to use UE4, because it has many more features over there. I know it is possible to use UE4 on Linux, but you always have to recompile it, you don’t have all graphics features etc. . One good way of supporting Linux would be the Launcher with binary support, or a automatic recompiling of the newest source, if available. Marketplace, as mentioned before, as well as learning tab etc. are great, but not easy to use from Linux.

Recent actions of Microsoft in the games-market should boost the development of more free standards in the industry in my opinion. I don't want a locked "Windows Only" market or something like that.

[Tomza]

Hello Tim, Epic Team, and UE4 Community

I support you Linux guys and add the link:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/epic-...m-501356.shtml

We all know what Microsoft is. Most people are just fed up with their dirty policies and they switch to Linux. So do I. Developing on Linux is like a fresh air, so we Linux users ask you the people who can do anything for making the Linux version of UE4 full fledged to give us a chance to have an enjoyable developing. I have been using UE4 for one year and it is an awesome application. I gave Unity 3D up for good. No launcher, Market Place, binary version, but the most important for me is the possibility to build for all platforms just like in the Windows version of UE4. I need to build clients not only for Linux. It is a big enterprise application we will be working over and we are ready to pay you Epic Team for a special support. We made a decision to use Linux but not being able to build for other platforms is a disaster for us. I ask WHY? Why are we treated as the worse ones? Stop favoring Windows.

[cora]

sadly Epic has been ignoring this issue.
not even confirming if there are at least discussions about this among the developers.

[Salamanderrake]

Yeah we need the the launcher on Linux so developers who buy from the Unreal store can access the assets on the computers they are developing on. Also this would help Linux users who want to get into game development if they could access the same resources/tutorials/etc... that Windows and mac users get. It would also help, I don't know of any, schools that use Linux machines for cost reasons who want to teach game development using UE4.

[Sir_Brizz]

I agree. This has been an extremely low priority for Epic for some time and across many engine versions. It would be nice to see some actual support of alternative OSes, even making cross compiling a lot easier on Windows would be a big boost. Right now, Linux isn't even a build target by default. It's very disappointing.

[honaj]

Agreed, it's long overdue.

[Whammy]

Yes, it would be nice. It's a pain in the backside having to load content on windoze and then transfer it to linux.

[kalaksi]

I agree. I hope there will be at least some discussion about the difficulties, different possibilities (as suggested by OP) and opportunities in how the community could help with the launcher.

[sypher7]

Just tossing my hat in here.

Us GNU/Linux devs are no stranger to taking a back seat and waiting on features (or putting in some elbow grease and implementing them ourselves). And Epic has been great to us by letting us hack their code and making it freely available.

Hopefully someone at Epic sees this post and gives the Linux editor just a little bit of love. We saw this update about two years ago:

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/un...ne-4-and-linux

In which, it was stated Epic wanted to make Linux a first class citizen, and cited both Linux as a viable platform target as well as native Linux dev tools as part of that path. I think it is probably time to give Linux a little more priority.

I know you all (Epic) have a lot on your plates, but Yaakuro put forth some good short term solutions that probably would not take a lot of effort to get rolling.

Here's hoping for some much needed attention on the Linux side of things!

[amigo]

To make a practical suggestion, I propose that Epic puts out the non-proprietary portions of the Launcher source code on github, e.g. everything not dealing with purchasing (but including the ability to get free items).

Initially it might be a task for someone at Epic to single out the related code, but perhaps the purchasing part could be made as a plug-in to a "standardized" Launcher application. That might even make the maintenance easier going forward.

In turn, we (the Linux Community) would take care of forking the Launcher and maintaining the Linux port, the same way we did with the Engine, until a such time comes when Epic is ready to release a full binary Launcher for Linux.

Thank-you for listening.

P.S. forgot to add, obviously any modification/change we make will be PR-ed back to Epic, as we did with the Engine.

[NeWincpp]

I just can Agree... I have like 30$ stuck on my account because the market place is unusable on linux and I was subscribed when unreal wasn't free.

[Tomza]

Guys, please tell if I can build for Windows when I develop on Linux.

[Keziolio]

+1

This is the main reason i stopped developing with UE4, it's impossible to be productive with this kind of support