Space Station 13/List of guides/Playing on Linux
While the game won't run perfectly like it does on Windows, it'll still be good enough to be playable!Running the game on Linux has been an issue prior to BYOND 516, but cause of the WebView2 update. It's been much easier to play it now. This page will help you install Space Station 13 on Linux, so you can play Sharty Station 13 and other servers. While the Lutris script for installing the game has been mostly fine for some people, it seems that it has been broken for some while so this guide will teach you how to install it manually. Most of the information for this thread has been sourced from this Goonstation Forums thread.
Prerequisites[edit | edit source]
You should have WINE installed, and your WINE version should atleast be 10. You can figure out your wine version by running wine --version in your terminal. If you don't have it installed, it's probably downloadable on your package manager under the alias of wine.
Winetricks, despite their similar naming schemes. WINE and Winetricks are not the same. Winetricks allows you to modify your wine configuration very easily. Check this page for help installing on your Distro.
1. Open up Winetricks by your search menu of choice, or by running winetricks in a Terminal.
The latest version of BYOND and the latest version of the WebView2 evergreen bootstrapper. You can find the executables to install those by clicking the links.
Steps to installing[edit | edit source]
1. Open winetricks through a search menu of your choice, or by typing winetricks in your console.
2. Once the prefix is created, click on the "Install a font" button.
corefonts. Click on it, then click the "OK" button, you'll see a lot of error messages thrown at you. This is perfectly fine, just keep clicking "OK", until the messages stop and the Winetricks menu will show up again.3. Once back at the winetricks menu, select the 'Run a commandline shell (for debugging)' option. Then in the terminal, execute the command winetricks dxvk vcrun2022. This will begin the install process for a pair of dependencies required by BYOND, you might need to say yes to some things and it may take a while. After it's done, close out of the console and you'll be back at the Winetricks menu.
Run a wine cmd shell4. Once back in the winetricks menu, click on the "Run an arbitrary Executable" button.
5. Once you're back in the Winetricks menu. Click the "Run winecfg" button.
6. Now for the final step, click the "Run an arbitrary Executable" button again but instead find whereever you installed your BYOND .exe installer and run it. The installer should be pretty simple, click through the buttons and BYOND should launch for you. You should be able to run the game now!
On at least some distros, installing a program this way via WINE will automatically add a system shortcut to your usual desktop environment's search bar, as if it were a native Linux program. BYOND web links from your browser will also work, so you can click on the Sharty Station shortcut link on /ss/ to launch the game if you'd like to, or by putting byond://ss13.soyjak.st:8888 in your browser bar to join.
TROUBLESHOOTING & KNOWN ISSUES:[edit | edit source]
Some of these issues are effectively guaranteed, others may be on a case-by-case basis, and you might even encounter problems that aren't here. If that happens: I probably can't help, sorry.
- If BYOND fails to launch at all, either after your first setup or just in general... yeah it does that sometimes. You might have some luck with using your task manager to kill byond.exe, otherwise a system reboot will usually do it. (From experience, though: after a fresh system startup, wait a minute or so before trying to launch BYOND.)
- You'll probably suffer from a severely flickering UI at times, or the UI may just become black at random parts. This is pretty normal, just click on it and it should be fine.
- Item & ability tooltips are at war with euclidean geometry. More news at 7. (I have found no fix for this.)
- It has trouble reconnecting automatically after a round restart. SOMETIMES it does. Usually it doesn't. Closing BYOND and re-launching is your friend.
- Sometimes, after rebooting while in a round, WINE will immediately crash upon trying to load back in. This will go away on its own once the round ends, but don't despair: you can fix this immediately by opening up your BYOND pager (the BYOND application itself), clicking on the gear icon in the top right, 'Preferences', 'Games', then click 'Clear Cache'. You should then be able to reconnect (albeit it'll take a good 10-30 seconds to redownload all the assets that you just cleared.)
- LINUX MINT USERS SPECIFICALLY: By default, Mint will consume any alt-clicks, which prevents you from using Goon's alt-click to examine feature. You can fix this by opening up Mint's 'Windows' settings menu (literally just search 'Windows'), going into the 'Behaviour' tab, then setting the 'special key to move and resize windows' option to disabled. Voila - you can now examine again.
- Upon tabbing back into the game, you'll probably have to click in order for the game to be re-focused and BYOND to start reading your inputs. Keep in mind that the click itself will be registered by the game so don't accidentally harmbaton someone or something.
- When playing as the AI, exiting out of your shell can take a hot minute.
- TGUI works great, but sometimes it really doesn't like trying to have multiple TGUI windows open at once. Your mileage may vary.
- When closing out of Sharty Station and even BYOND as a whole, the WebView2 process might not end properly - leading to a lingering, dead process consuming memory just laying about in your system after every close. It also seems to make the game respond slower and slower with each one accrued. I advise going through your task manager regularly to kick these processes out.
