UE4.1 Linux packaging failure; sound missing during playback

Development Platform & Builds
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1

I’ve compiled 4.1 from source and deployed cross-compiler, etc for Linux packaging.

I built the UE4Game-Linux-Shipping binary and proceeded to package Elemental demo for Linux. After several hours of cooking (on a Dual Xeon with 16 cores) I was greeted with a failure.

Cooking was done successfully, but the packaging process failed because it was looking for UE4Game filename in Engine/Binaries/Linux even though it claims it’s searching by wildcard for UE4Game*, and not finding my UE4Game-Linux-Shipping.

I renamed the UE4Game-Linux-Shipping to just UE4Game and restarted packaging for Linux. Luckily, it skipped already cooked items and successfuly wrote into my staging folder 2.32GB of files.

In Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 x64) trying to start ue4game from package’s engine/binaries/linux folder would not budge because execute flag was missing.

After adding the execute and trying again, nothing happened. It just said “Using binned.”

I know from before that the problem is the binary filename not being named with a package name, in this case “elemental”

Renaming it to “elemental” starts the demo, after a few moments of loading. There’s some stutter but it plays.

No sound is heard and an error in terminal is: AL lib: (EE) oss_open_playback: Could not open /dev/dsp: No such file or directory

This is happening because Ubuntu does not use ALSA anymore but PulseAudio. The fix for this is to build OpenAL (as a static lib even) with ALSA and PulseAudio support so that more platforms are covered.

Hopefully you can use the above report to make fixes in the 4.1 so that packages are properly exported for Linux, and playing back fully.

2

We have only started testing Linux recently, and support for it is still very early and rough. These are all known issues that are already on our list to fix.

3

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that we don’t appreciate the reports. I meant only to communicate that we are aware of these particular issues and are working on fixing them.

4

Not to sound like Mr.Obvious but these are new to us, and I thought maybe Epic wanted to get these bug reports…

Should we stop reporting them instead?

Thanks.

5

Cool. I wish there was a public bug tracker so we don’t have to report duplicate.

Thanks.

6

Sound has been fixed in main by the way. OpenAL as distributed has not been compiled with ALSA and PulseAudio as you correctly point out. Precisely due to this variety of choices, initially we did not intend to distribute OpenAL and instead list it as a requirement for a target system. Unfortunately, Steam runtime lacks it, so it had to be bundled.

7

I’m going to try to compile the master now and see if I can use that to package. Or maybe I’ll just compile OpenAL from there and copy the libopenal.so.1 over.

Thanks again.