Unity3D Web Player In Linux Browsers Thanks To Pipelight

By hardpenguin - 25 January 2014 at 12:37 pm UTC | Views: 170,184

Since Unity3D in its fourth version introduced Linux builds export, many good things happened to our game market - a huge portion of games appearing on Linux are currently made with Unity. However, we did not get the Web Player browser plugin for our platform which is unfortunate, because it is often used in demo or early versions of Unity3D games.

That's why the Pipelight project some time ago introduced Unity3D plugin support. Pipelight brings newest versions of Windows plugins (Silverlight, Flash, Unity3D and few others) to Linux browsers using Wine "ports" or "pipes".

It really works (to me on Debian 7 with both Firefox and Chromium) and is quite easy to install. Exact instructions for installation on various Linux distributions can be found here:
http://fds-team.de/cms/pipelight-installation.html

Remember to turn the plugin on after installation! As root (or with sudo):

pipelight-plugin --enable unity3d

After that you can try running some Unity3D Web Player demos, e.g. on Kongregate, I recommend Race The Sun for testing purposes:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/flippfly/race-the-sun

More Unity3D games on Kongregate:
http://www.kongregate.com/unity-games
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: HOWTO, Unity, Wine

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18 comments

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gubs 25 Jan, 2014

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Hmm, does anyone know if this works with Jagged Alliance Online?

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Half-Shot 25 Jan, 2014

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Sounds really cool, I haven't had that much experience with Unity3D web games but I'm sure this can pave some of the way for developers that don't want to think about packaging games.

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hardpenguin 25 Jan, 2014

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Quoting: Quote from gubsHmm, does anyone know if this works with Jagged Alliance Online?

It tends to have problems with more complex games but... Just try it out :)

Quoting: Quote from Half-ShotSounds really cool, I haven't had that much experience with Unity3D web games but I'm sure this can pave some of the way for developers that don't want to think about packaging games.

I'd say no. Pipelight is not an official solution and it has no warranty of working properly (while it mostly does). It is still Wine after all. This is not the right way for developers, but it is a good way for Linux gamers to widen their gaming possibilities.

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DrMcCoy 25 Jan, 2014

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QuotePipelight brings newest versions of Windows plugins (Silverlight, Flash, Unity3D and few others) to Linux browsers using Wine

Ugh, I haven't even heard about this horrible abomination. I'm going to have to roll for sanity loss now.

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HadBabits 25 Jan, 2014

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I appreciate their efforts, though mainly for allowing me to watch Netflix. (Despite performance and heavy graphical errors if not running fullscreen; I think it's an catalyst issue)

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manny 25 Jan, 2014

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well browsers will be getting rid of NPAPI in 2014, so hopefully its an incentive for some of them to upgrade their stuff to better standards and multiplatform support.

http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-friend-npapi.html

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minj 25 Jan, 2014

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Weird timing on this article :P

This will be of no use to anyone soon anyway since NPAPI is going down.

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Guest 26 Jan, 2014

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Quoting: Quote from DrMcCoy
Quoting: QuotePipelight brings newest versions of Windows plugins (Silverlight, Flash, Unity3D and few others) to Linux browsers using Wine
Ugh, I haven't even heard about this horrible abomination. I'm going to have to roll for sanity loss now.

This. Regardless of if this will be made redundant by browsers dropping NPAPI support, to jack Wine in to a native browser is a terrible choice.

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philip550c 27 Jan, 2014

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Quoting: Quote from DrMcCoy
Quoting: QuotePipelight brings newest versions of Windows plugins (Silverlight, Flash, Unity3D and few others) to Linux browsers using Wine
Ugh, I haven't even heard about this horrible abomination. I'm going to have to roll for sanity loss now.

Its the best way to watch netflix in linux though. I dont really use netflix but I bought a months worth of service just to try out pipelight. It worked well actually for me but I did not try any other service. I would be very dissapointed to see developers think they could claim linux support by using pipelight but for those people that have netflix accounts this is much better than the previous way which was to run the whole browser in wine.

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philip550c 27 Jan, 2014

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Quoting: Quote from HadBabitsI appreciate their efforts, though mainly for allowing me to watch Netflix. (Despite performance and heavy graphical errors if not running fullscreen; I think it's an catalyst issue)

What kind of graphical errors? I did not experience any errors using nvidia so your assumption might be correct.

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