Sunday, April 19, 2015

Troubleshooting Unity engine games on Linux

Deutsche Version

Problem: Mouse constantly moving to the top / game freezes after a few seconds

Some games using the Unity 4 engine seem to be affected by a problem using the mouse: Typically the mouse is constantly moving up to the top of the screen and the picture is freezing after a few seconds. If you change to another application via Alt + Tab and change back to the game again (in some environments clicking a mouse button in the game is also sufficient), picture and mouse will move for a few seconds again. Especially games played from a first person perspective are affected.

Known workarounds

Workaround option 1
Play the game in window mode and set the resolution to your native resolution minus the width of your window decoration (e.g. 1912×1072 instead of 1920×1080) or lower. The game’s configuration file where you can adjust those settings can be found in ~/.config/unity3d/<Developer name>/<Game name>/prefs

Workaround option 2
Use another window manager (e.g. openbox, fluxbox, blackbox, wmaker, fvwm2, twm are known to work).

Other workarounds
KDE users may also try the following: http://steamcommunit … #c846965882766096888

Affected games

I’m currently aware of the following games still affected, which is almost certainly not a complete list. Whether the problem occurs or not seems to be dependent on the mouse polling rate and window manager, so just because those games are listed here doesn’t necessarily mean you will also get this problem.

  • Doorways
  • Surgeon Simulator 2013
  • Gone Home
  • Ravensword
  • MirrorMoon EP
  • Jazzpunk
  • Galak-Z
  • Nimble Quest

Problem: Strange things are happening in the game

Some Unity 4 games don’t like non english locales. Typical symptoms when this happens are events that won’t be triggered or will be triggered only after a long delay, overlapping graphical elements in the user interface or a black screen after loading the main game.

Or in other words: If a Unity based game doesn’t work as expected just try this workaround :-)

Workaround

Start the game e.g. on the command line with the variables LC_ALL=C LANG=C; for example Ravensword would be started with

LC_ALL=C LANG=C ./rs2.x86

Problem: The game doesn’t start, xxx is corrupted

If the game doesn’t start (i.e. it just crashes or only shows a cursor on a black screen) and the log file in ~/.config/unity3d/<Developer name>/<Game name>/Player.log contains messages such as

Error (8/12/2017 6:10:57 PM) - The file '<installation directory>/<Game name>/<Game name>_Data/resources.assets' is corrupted! Remove it and launch unity again!
[Position out of bounds! 875850853 > 69016]

then you will need to install lsb_release to get the game working.

Known affected games

  • Caravan
  • The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief