Making the source available to the community has great benefits

May 12, 2014 06:48 GMT  ·  By

The Unreal Tournament announcement made by Epic Game last week took everyone by surprise, but the Linux community is now showing what it's capable of. It seems that the Unreal Editor has been ported by someone before Epic got a chance to.

One of the most important pieces of software for the Unreal Engine 4 that will be used in the recently announced Unreal Tournament game is the Unreal Editor. Up until now, developers had to use the Windows version and compile games for Linux on that platform.

Epic Games, the developers of both the Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Tournament, have said for a few weeks now that Linux is a platform of interest for them and that the engine has been built to take advantage of it.

Everyone else interested in using the new Unreal engine can purchase the rights to use it from the official website for a measly price (which is actually a monthly subscription). In doing so, the developers will get everything they need because the Unreal Editor and level building tools are built into UE4.

The latest Unreal Engine update report said that developers would be able to package the games and deploy to SteamOS and Linux, but with a single problem – deploying projects to Linux requires compiling source from GitHub using a Windows computer.

One of the developers who did buy the Unreal Engine 4 tools also received the editor, which obviously only works on Windows. With some clever porting work, he got it to work on Linux, although it's still in the early stages.

Epic Games has already announced that they plan to release a Linux Editor sometime in the future, but the Linux community got ahead of them. The developer sent an image of the working Unreal Editor running Linux and the guys from Epic went to Twitter and acknowledged the fact that someone from the community had beat them to the punch.

There is still a lot of work to be done and it's unclear whether Epic Games will continue to make the Editor or if the studio will just adopt the work that is already being done. Either way, it seems that the Linux developers will probably get their editor sooner than expected.

The new Unreal Tournament is expected to be the first game built with Unreal Engine 4 that will also have Linux support, although it's possible that another studio could release something before then.