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Zombie Panic! Source, the free survival-horror first-person-shooter has put out a Linux beta as promised as it remains a high priority.

The Linux beta build comes with the big 3.1 beta patch, which has a new recoil system, new sound effects, new weapons, new achievements, fixed up Steam Workshop support, hitboxes improvements and a lot more.

To get access, you need to opt-in to the Beta on Steam. There's no password required, you simple need to go into the game's properties, hit the beta tab and select "unstable" drop the dropdown.

There's a caveat though with installing it, which involves Steam Play. If, like me, you have Steam Play enabled for all titles instead of just the whitelist you will need to start the download, then opt into the beta and restart Steam. Otherwise, it will always try to use Steam Play. This is because it doesn't have a Linux version outside of the opt-in beta.

See the full details about the Linux version here. Most importantly, they're only supporting Ubuntu (along with Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc) and SteamOS but not forks like Linux Mint. There's also some known issues you should take a look over.

I've tried to test it, but it won't connect to any of the servers, even the Beta servers currently up. Something about the game being in insecure mode and it won't go any further, so I've let them know. Hopefully a fix will come soon for that.

See more about it on Steam.

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5 comments

ison111 Dec 2, 2018
Quoting: PatolaWhat makes it different from Left4Dead2? (besides being free, of course)
The game mode is different. I don't know if the mode has an official name but I always call it "survival mode" after its name in AvP2. The basic idea is that almost all the players spawn on 1 team and only a few spawn on a 2nd team (chosen at random at the start of each new round). As players from the 1st team die they respawn on the 2nd team.
In this case it's zombies, so as the round progresses and more humans die there are more and more zombies on the map.
You also spawn with very little to defend yourself and are very easy prey for zombies so the beginning of each round you have to collect weapons and ammo, and sometimes try to barricade yourself up in a safe place before the map is overrun by zombies.

Humans win if the zombies run out of lives, or if they complete an objective (depending on the map), and zombies win if all the humans die or the time runs out.


Last edited by ison111 on 2 December 2018 at 8:08 am UTC
Boldos Dec 2, 2018
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Ummm - in the description, it saiz it requires HL2, because it is a HL2 MOD?
orochi_kyo Dec 2, 2018
Completely agree with not supporting other distros than Ubuntu. Im not Ubuntu elitist but as the "too many flavors" pretext is becoming more used by some devs I prefer to have one supported version of the game on Linux than nothing.
Having a Ubuntu version playable means that it could be playable on Mint or Arch, much better than nothing.
razing32 Dec 3, 2018
Quoting: orochi_kyoCompletely agree with not supporting other distros than Ubuntu. Im not Ubuntu elitist but as the "too many flavors" pretext is becoming more used by some devs I prefer to have one supported version of the game on Linux than nothing.
Having a Ubuntu version playable means that it could be playable on Mint or Arch, much better than nothing.

If it runs on one Linux distro it can run on all.
Guessing the only issues are some dependencies or libraries.
Shepard62FR Dec 6, 2018
Hello, Shepard62FR, responsible for the Linux port of Zombie Panic! Source.

Quoting: BoldosUmmm - in the description, it saiz it requires HL2, because it is a HL2 MOD?

The requirement for the ownership of HL2 has been removed months ago, just download the game from Steam, switch to the "unstable" branch and play right away.

Quoting: orochi_kyoCompletely agree with not supporting other distros than Ubuntu. Im not Ubuntu elitist but as the "too many flavors" pretext is becoming more used by some devs I prefer to have one supported version of the game on Linux than nothing.
Having a Ubuntu version playable means that it could be playable on Mint or Arch, much better than nothing.

I think you misread our pinned topic on our Steam forums about the Linux client so I invite you to read again.

We (me and the ZPS dev. team) never mentioned that "too many flavors" excuse. We wanted to support the major Linux distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Mint...) but we can't because we have barriers that we can't overcome.

In a nutshell, we explained in that topic that because of Valve's policy of "Ubuntu only" when it comes to anything Linux related and because ZPS is still built as a "mod" because we can't pay +$50k like Contagion/Garry's Mod/Insurgency for the entire Source engine license, we have these technical barriers that we can't overcome. We can't add a Vulkan renderer if we wanted to. I can't go inside the engine to upgrade every third party library being used. Since ZPS is on Steam, I wouldn't be able to remove the dependency of the "Steam Runtime" (aka the Ubuntu sandbox).

Fun fact: I dislike Ubuntu myself and prefer Arch based Linux distros instead and I have no choice but to set aside Arch and use Ubuntu to port ZPS on Linux. I tried and I lost of time because of that.

Quoting: razing32
Quoting: orochi_kyoCompletely agree with not supporting other distros than Ubuntu. Im not Ubuntu elitist but as the "too many flavors" pretext is becoming more used by some devs I prefer to have one supported version of the game on Linux than nothing.
Having a Ubuntu version playable means that it could be playable on Mint or Arch, much better than nothing.

If it runs on one Linux distro it can run on all.
Guessing the only issues are some dependencies or libraries.

You are right, it's mostly dependencies related. One of the players had an issue with "OPENSSL_1.0.0" stuff, I'm guessing his OpenSSL was too modern for the Source engine, I don't know if he fixed the problem tho.
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