Unreal Linux Mono

Development Platform & Builds
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So apparently Mono is a microsoft invention they acquired, tweaked, and renamed…

As such - there are many Linux users who pay money to buy games for their Linux PCs that may object to having Mono installed ( this is particularly more the case after microsoft bought GitHub)…

I have 2 questions:

  1. Do you have to have Mono installed on a Linux computer that is just going to run the games made with Unreal?

  2. Is there a way to install the Unreal Editor on Linux withOUT Mono installed?

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bump any information would be appreciated even forum topics or documentation to help me understand this better.

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  1. No the games do not need mono once packaged as far as I know.
  2. Yes you do need mono to use the Editor, mostly for packaging/compiling the game, the tools are written in c# and without mono you would be dead in the water trying to even build the engine from the source.
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ohh I think I see, so you’re saying that the engine itself it written in C++ exclusively but the tools for packing it and cross-compiling are written in C#?

hmmm… Then I can use windows to develop the games in even if the target platform is linux because I could just have Visual Studio cross-compile the resulting games targeting Linux?

If mono isn’t needed to just play the games on Linux then those die-hard linux anti-microsoft fans would all be happy and then i can get paid :smiley:

please let me know if i misinterpreted any of that

5

Yes that is so, C# is slightly more portable so having the tools written in it do make sense, having c++ as a main engine language makes sense from the low level high speed point of view.

That is generally the practice, you can cross-compile from Windows to multiple platform with ease, from what I know, you do need specialized hardware once you go Mac or some other platforms. But please be sure to test the game on the target platform at least to some extent, there are strange things happening sometimes that you do not really expect to happen(graphical glitches, missing textures, wrong collision).

Mono is not perceived as the big evil, if it is needed most people just go with it even if they grind their teeth installing it, but it is open and MIT license so it is good(some might argue that what is not GPL does not exist but that would be the minority).

As a side note, you can set up CI to package the game for various platforms from the command line more on this here A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Unreal Engine Forums

You can see the command that is being executed in the packaging log when you do it from the editor.