Using Unreal Engine 4 Marketplace on Linux

One of the biggest problem when developing on Linux with Unreal Engine 4 is the absence of Epic Games Launcher and Marketplace. The Engine itself can be built from source, but there is no source code for the Launcher. Luckily, there is a solution for that and it’s name is Lutris.

Lutris is a platform which installs and runs games and applications using emulators and compatibility layers using the best possible configurations. In other words – it makes installing games using Wine much, much easier.

Here’s my approach in using Lutris to download content from the UE4 Marketplace.

My specs

Before we go through the whole thing just a little information about my computer specifications:

I’m working on Kubuntu 18.04 with Plasma KDE 5.12.9. I have Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 card with 415.27 driver. Other configurations might require some extra work or different commands to launch.

With this in mind, let’s install Lutris!>

Installing Lutris

To install Lutris I used apt-get commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lutris-team/lutris
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lutris

For other distributions check https://lutris.net/downloads

Installing dependencies

Before we run Lutris let’s just install some important components:

Installing Wine dependencies
Lutris uses Wine to run Epic Games Launcher. To make sure it has all required elements run following commands:

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-stable

For other distributions and Ubuntu versions check https://github.com/lutris/lutris/wiki/Wine-Dependencies

Installing Vulkan drivers
Epic Games Launcher uses Vulkan so if you don’t have proper drivers installed yet do it by running following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libvulkan1 libvulkan1:i386

For other distributions and other graphic cards check https://github.com/lutris/lutris/wiki/Installing-drivers

Installing Epic Games Launcher

You can now launch Lutris. To find Epic Games Launcher click the search icon, then click the "Search Lutris.net" button and search for "Epic Games Store".

Right click on "Epic Games Store" and select "Install" option. Press "Install" button for the latest version and select the path you want to be used for an installation.

Now just sit and relax, maybe make a cup of tea. The installation process can take a while. After the installation is complete Right Click on "Epic Games Store" in application list (deselect the search button first) and press "Play"!

Congratulations! You should see a login page now. You can now use Epic Games Launcher just like on Windows!

Downloading content

Unreal Engine Marketplace doesn’t allow to simply download content. You must point the project where the content should be added. This is a problem, as if we want to use our Engine’s version built on Linux from the source, this engine and our projects won’t be visible for the Launcher. To workaround this issue we can create a fake project, which the Launcher will be treating as a project it can put downloaded content into.

Let’s go to the default Unreal Projects’ directory. In my case it was:

/media/damian/F/EpicGamesStore/drive_c/users/damian/My Documents/Unreal Projects

Then let’s create a directory for our fake project (let’s call it “Dummy”) and create Dummy.uproject file then. This should be a text file with a following content:

{
    "FileVersion": 3,
    "EngineAssociation": "4.23"
}

where "EngineAssociation" is the Engine version we want to use.

Restart Epic Games Launcher. Now we can see our Dummy project in projects’ list:

Let’s add Animation Starter Pack to our Dummy project.

There should be a Content folder in our Dummy project directory, with Animation Starter Pack assets inside. We can copy them into our other projects now!

And that’s it! With some little effort you can use UE4 Marketplace on Linux and there shouldn’t be any more obstacles with developing UE4 games on this system. I hope this article helped you a little. Cheers!