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Native Linux Client (Experimental)

Undone

Undone

Codemaster
Stormhaven Studios
Recent Unity engine updates seem to have resolved a few outstanding bugs with the Linux client. I can now successfully build and launch the native linux client. There are still a few lingering issues with the mouse cursor that show after holding right click, but outside of that things appear to be ok? My test box runs Ubuntu 20.04 with an i7-7820X, 32gigs of ram, and an EVGA NVidia 1060. It's not perfect but I'd love to hear how it performs compared to anyone running the game under proton/etc.

Until I can get automated builds setup for the linux client it will have to be manually done. Links with a build date are below.

Date​
Link​
Approximate Size​
May 31st, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_5.31.23.tar.gz​
4.6 GB​
June 27th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_6.27.23.tar.gz​
5.2 GB​
July 4th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_7.4.23.tar.gz​
5.2 GB​
August 14th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_8.14.23.tar.gz​
4.9 GB​
August 29th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_8.29.23.tar.gz​
5.1 GB​
September 5th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_9.5.23.tar.gz​
5.1 GB​
September 26th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_9.26.23.tar.gz​
5.2 GB​
October 10th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_10.10.23.tar.gz​
5.2 GB​
October 13th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_10.13.23.tar.gz​
5.2 GB​
October 31st, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_10.31.23.tar.gz​
5.3 GB​
November 7th, 2023​
embers_adrift_linux_11.7.23.tar.gz​
5.2 GB​
November 28th, 2023​
5.5 GB​
 
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Many, many thanks for this Undone.
I spent some time getting an initial impression of this client during today's community meeting. Most of that time was changing all the key-binds to my normal defaults. :)
Performance does not seems as good as via Proton, which doesn't come as a surprise, it hasn't had anything like the same time on it so not expecying it to. Does it use OpenGL or Vulkan? If you can use Vulkan directly it would really nice, but I've heard that doesn't play nice in Unity.

I'll try to spend more time with this and leave more feedback later.
 
I fired it up. It worked.

Performance and memory use is worse than under wine/proton. Unplayable in treed areas with my old RX580.

Is this something you really want to spend your time on?

Let me know what info you want.
 
belarios said:
I fired it up. It worked.

Performance and memory use is worse than under wine/proton. Unplayable in treed areas with my old RX580.
Click to expand...
haha I guess it's not all that surprising. What else should I expect from Unity?!

belarios said:
Is this something you really want to spend your time on?
Click to expand...
Haven't spent too much time on it. I just boot up the latest Unity release every once in a while and try a build - which consists of me pushing a few buttons and waiting a few hours for it to finish while I work on other things. This time it just happened to finish which was a huge improvement over previous results :)

My main curiosity is if the game is playable in any configuration? In other words: with newer graphics cards does it offer a viable alternative to the wine/proton route? I need to rip my 2080 out of my windows box and give that a shot. Either way thanks for testing I'll continue poking this in hopes that it continues to improve!
 
Spent more time playing on this this afternoon. So far, I would say the performance is comparable with the Proton equivalent. Meadowlands is still hellish on my machine, but other zones are more than playable.
I still need to get some time playing in a group to see how that goes.

For reference my hardware is:
Ryzen 5800X, 64 GB RAM, nVidia 1060, NVMe M.2 SSD.
 
I spent a couple hours gathering in Redshore. I'd say that while the performance is a little lower than the Proton version, it is very similar.

BTW I'm using the Manjaro distro.
 
I found out what was causing my performance and memory problems.

I use arch linux and the gnome desktop in wayland mode. With wine/proton the game runs fine on my wayland desktop using Xwayland. (wine is starting to merge some wayland support this year, but it cannot yet be enabled). But running the native client triggers something in gnome's mutter display server. It still uses Xwayland but it triggers something called mutter-x11-frames which apparently is new and finicky.

I switched to gnome under x11 and the native client runs well, similarly to wine. I also tried it under sway, another wayland display manager, instead of gnome/mutter, and the native client ran fine under Xwayland.

Archer is either using gnome in x11 mode or it is a new problem in mutter. Manjaro is based on arch, but runs behind. My mutter is 44.1 and the manjaro stable is 43.5. Your ubuntu 20.04 uses an old version of mutter. Ubuntu 23.04 is using gnome/mutter version 44 so might have the problem in wayland mode.

The problem is likely only using gnome in wayland mode with version 44+ of gnome/mutter.

Unity has experimental wayland support. https://forum.unity.com/threads/experimental-wayland-support-for-linux-player.1382685/ but -force-wayland does nothing with the embers exe.

I dunno anything about unity. Is that command line argument something that can be enabled when you build?

Again, wine/proton performance is fine. Gnome/X11 is fine. Non-gnome wayland display manager is fine. So not asking you to put a lot of effort into this.

EDIT: nevermind on the wayland. I see that the switch was not in 2021.3.2
 
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Hey there, just woke up and thought I'd register to these forums just to say: Way to go, thanks for supporting Linux natively! I found out about this during one of Nathan Napalms Youtube streams recently, and couldn't believe that you guys now support Windows, Mac and Linux altogether. This is a prime example of fair play. Been a Linux and Mac user for decades now, not a single Windows machine in our household, and seeing mmo devs go the extra-mile makes me a happy little bunny. Sure, Proton works great nowadays, but doing it natively shows that you care and I appreciate that very much. That said, my home world mmo is a different one (EQ2), so I haven't purchased Embers yet, but I will partake in the free weekend, if my wife can take the kids for a while that is, and if it runs well on my Ubuntu Linux machine, then I will most certainly be purchasing Embers in order to show my support and gratitude for yet another indie dev team showing Linux some love.

Last but not least, good choice / call by focusing on a single Linux distro. Ubuntu LTS sounds good to me, especially since you don't have to continuously test your game against it as much as you'd normally do with the shorter interim releases, but I would suggest to additionally test with 22.04 LTS as well. Both 20.04 and 22.04 LTS are good imo, that way you can verify that ppl running an older and newer release of Ubuntu Linux will be fine in the long run.

Thanks,
Just another penguin
 
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I used the linux client for several hours today. Performance was fine, but ram use kept climbing until a crash. Possible memory leak.
 
It seems to play very poorly for me, I am running Garuda (Arch) with a Ryzen 9 and Nvidia 1650 potato edition.
Please let me know if you needs logs or anything from me, I would like to help out.
 
Sephirah said:
It seems to play very poorly for me, I am running Garuda (Arch) with a Ryzen 9 and Nvidia 1650 potato edition.
Please let me know if you needs logs or anything from me, I would like to help out.
Click to expand...
Have you tried the Windows version through Proton? This initial test is more about if it is a viable alternative to that.
 
Sephirah said:
It seems to play very poorly for me, I am running Garuda (Arch) with a Ryzen 9 and Nvidia 1650 potato edition.
Please let me know if you needs logs or anything from me, I would like to help out.
Click to expand...
Archer said:
Have you tried the Windows version through Proton? This initial test is more about if it is a viable alternative to that.
Click to expand...

Alrighty, found the time to jump in too. I can confirm what Seph said, the game runs fine as far as I can tell, no stability issues thus far, but poor performance / fps is an issue for sure. Potato mode is giving me around 10-20 fps at 1080p resolution in the starting area slaying deers. I can only assume this to be normal since this is an unoptimised test client most likely running debug tools and other analysing things in the background, like Archer implied further above. That said, I have seen ppl on Windows with an rx 580, gtx 970 and 1070 struggle a lot here and there, so not entirely sure tbh.

System:

Dell Optiplex 7050MT
Core i7 7700
Nvidia RTX A2000 (comparable to the RTX 3050 performance-wise, basically around two times faster than a gtx 1060)
32 GB DDR4
1TB NVME M2 gaming drive + more
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and 23.04 (X11)

Will continue testing periodically throughout the day, might try to test and compare against the Windows version via Proton if possible. Noticed that dlss is missing from the graphics menu in this experimental client: IIRC Proton now supports dlss and other Nvidia exclusive features, and I would like to try with dlss just to see how that affects performance. PS: +1 vote for an Amd fsr and Nvidia dlss 3 + Frame Generation option (the latter currently limited to Nvidia's 40 series unfortunately).
 
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Thanks to the devs for supporting Linux. I am a little surprised however that people are asking for it when it works with proton. I haven't found native vulkan games to be especially better than wine/proton. In fact, I almost exclusively run proton. I'm about to fire up the linux version to see if this holds true. With proton I was seeing framerates around 50-70fps with most things on high/ultra at 1440p. While that is not great performance on my machine, I think its more likely indicative of optimization in general rather than the method of running the game.

Also on Garuda Linux (arch) with a 7950x3d and 6800xt. Will report back with my findings.
 
The linux client does seem to give a bump in performance by about 10 fps, but with quirks. Full disclosure, I have not played very long was just giving the trial weekend a go. I have not tested many proton options or run it in Lutris, I only booted it through Steam with proton GE custom, dxvk async and with gamemode on. It is therefore possible I could get similar performance with more effort.

Just to point out a few quirks:
It does not have exclusive full screen, so my mouse constantly drags out of the game window in full screen.
The 1% lows are higher, more hitching.
Graphically it seems to look a little worse (but maybe my imagination based on locations and time of day).
The shadows seem to bug out a little bit.

While the average framerate is higher, the lack of smoothness makes it feel lower. I will probably opt to use proton per the usual.
 
dullahan said:
Update: Lutris with newest proton GE with fsr and async is by far the best performance I've seen.
Click to expand...
Good to know, my notebook could use some help to run the game with a gtx 1650. But seems like I not having sucess turning FSR on. Seems like when I choose the desired resolution the thing won't upscale at all. Could I ask what steps you followed dullahan?
 
I didn't do anything other than turn the switch on in Lutris. I don't even know if its working, I only know when I launched it from wine/proton, i averaged about 60fps or so, and when I launch it from Lutris, i average closer to 80 with the same settings from the same prefix folder. The only drawback I'm having is being able save my keybindings. All other settings are retained, but something about the keybinds will not take but only when launched from Lutris.
 
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