I've been a Linux user for a long time now. I find it largely sad when a Game Studio doesn't provide a build of their game for my OS of choice. Yeah, I getting it adds "extra" support burden, but if you are using a modern game engine Unity. This is all smoothed over by engine itself unless you intentionally make choices that lock you into specific OS. Both Gods Unchained and Axie Infinity do use Unity. Enough about not having what I want.
Prep Work
I'm currently running Gods Unchained on Arch Linux. But finding the same packages for your distro should have the same effect. Here are the packages in needed to get this game working.
- GU Installer odds are fantastic that the website won't give you the option to download the game if you are already on a Linux machine.
- Winetricks enable the multilib repo and install
- Wine Valve Development version wine-valve-git @ AUR
- DXVK dxvk-bin @ AUR
Building your Wine Prefix
Yes, you can do this with the default Wine prefix of ~./wine but i find it better to use a custom prefix as it allows you to make changes that only this one app or game needs and could break others. If you need more info on prefixes Using WINE Prefixes covers the basics and more.
$ mkdir .gu
$ WINEPREFIX=~/.gu winecfg
Fix fonts
Gods Unchained launcher renders incorrectly without all the default Microsoft font stack. We will need them to even see what we are doing to log in. So we install them into our prefix. This takes a while even on fast machines.
$ WINEPREFIX=~/.gu winetricks corefonts
Make 3D rendering work
This fixes the all black background issue. Which while the game runs fine without it, makes it very difficult to play the game. It does require having Vulkan support on your machine though. Which shouldn't be an issue for most systems.
$ WINEPREFIX=~/.gu setup_dxvk install
Installing
Now we can install GU. If you saved the game installer some place else adjust as needed.
$ WINEPREFIX=~/.gu wine ~/Downloads/Immutable+Setup+0.11.0.exe
Verify install is working
$ cd ~/.gu/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/apollo-launcher/
$ WINEPREFIX=~/.gu wine Immutable.exe
The game launcher should start up now. Log in and give it a spin.
Making things Nice and Easy
Now that the game is set up you will find that the menu entry doesn't work when you try to run it. First we are going to make a copy of the default desktop file.
$ cp ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Immutable.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/gu.desktop
We will open the copy in a text editor. The only thing we want out of the text is the line that read something like.
Icon=5858_Immutable.0
Use that line to replace the line in this file below. Save the gu.desktop file with your corrected version.
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Gods Unchained
Exec="/home/verbalshadow/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/godsunchained.sh"
Icon=5858_Immutable.0
Type=Application
Categories=Game
Terminal=false
Next we will make a new text file with the name and location of ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/godsunchained.sh. Copy and paste the text from below into the file and save.
#! /usr/bin/bash
cd ~/.local/share/wineprefixes/GU2/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/apollo-launcher/
WINEPREFIX=~/.gu wine Immutable.exe
Now we make the shell script executable.
$ chmod u+x ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/godsunchained.sh
We should be able to find Gods Unchained in the Games menu now and it should run and play.
Last notes
If you have info for specific distros on where to find the packages or what packages to install let me now and update the info. Also, if you have issues let me know and I will help as much as I can. I have included a few troubleshooting sites below.
Troublshooting
- WineHQ Forums This is the home of Wine and related utilities.
- WINE @ Arch Wiki The Arch Wiki is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to understanding and configuring Linux systems not just Arch.
- Using WINE Prefixes Helpful site for using and understanding wine prefixes.
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