This guide will help you to record videos of your Unity project.

You can either go through from the top to the bottom of this document or directly go to the section you’re interested in.

You will learn in a few steps how to export custom bitmap fonts to use in your game developed on Unity or frameworks that support the same development resource for an app. (for Windows and Mac). Open File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) to find your Unity Project. Unless you’ve changed the default location for new projects, you’ll find your project in your Documents folder under Unity Projects. If you can’t find your project folder then open up the Unity Hub, find your project in the list and select ‘Show in Explorer’. In the dialog box, select the assets you want to include in the package by clicking on the boxes so they are checked. Leave the include dependencies box checked to auto-select any assets used by the ones you have selected. Click on Export to bring up File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) and choose where you want to store your package file.

Table of Contents

• Record your Screen
  • Windows
  • macOS
• Recommended Video Parameters

Record your Screen

This is not the preferred method, especially for exporting a high-resolution video, but definitely can be handy when making some short #gamedev clips to share.

Windows

There’re many ways to record screen on Windows, here we show two of the most accessible ways.

Xbox Overlay

If you’re using Windows 10, simply press Windows key + G to enable Xbox gaming overlay, which allows you to record the screen. The recorded video will be in the Video folder inside your Windows user folder (C:UsersYourNameVideos). However, you can’t record on Desktop or Windows File Explorer.

OBS

The other way is a free open-source software called OBS Studio, that you can download here https://obsproject.com/.

Note: OBS is the solution I recommend if you want to stream your #gamedev on Twitch or others.

Here shows the main window of the software.

The way it records is simple: record whatever enabled in the Sources list:

You can click the + button in the Sources area to add more source: like display, window, image, video, etc.

Once you added a source, you can arrange it in the top area called Canvas. You can resize these sources by dragging the red handles around the corners, you can also drag the source in the Canvas around if you like.

Here in the example, it shows I added two sources: my display and a window I picked, which is a Run window. So you will see that I zoomed the Window Capture source a larger size than it should be, and put it on a position in the Canvas. Meanwhile, because I’m capturing the exact same display so you will see my desktop infinitely looping in the OBS window.

Now you hit the Start Recording button, everything shown in the canvas will be recorded. You can access the video file by either go to the Video folder in your Windows user folder (you can specify that in the Settings) or click File -> Show Recordings.

To customize the video parameter, you can click Settings and select Video. Here are two types of resolutions we can choose:

Canvas Resolution: needless to say the size of the canvas, you might want it to be the same size as your display if you want to capture the entire screen.

Output Resolution: the resolution of the video. It affects streaming as well.

Common FPS Values: frame rate. Depending on the purpose, what I recommended is either 24, 30, or 60. For more details check the Framerate section.

If audio is required, by default OBS sets Desktop Audio as the audio source, we could use that. Go and check the Audio section in Settings, to make sure we’re selecting the right source from the drop-down menu. Here I have my speaker plugged in the monitor so I choose my DELL monitor, so that when I play music both I and OBS will hear it.

Here shows I assign my monitor as Windows audio output.

To test if it’s working, check the Audio Mixer to see if the green bars poping while playing sounds. (No idea why it shows Chinese even I switch everything to English but that exactly means Desktop Audio.)

macOS

Builtin Shortcut

macOS is quite handy on certain things and screen recording is one of them: no third party software needed, by pressing Command + Shift + 5 you will see the following:

You will see 5 buttons listed in a row, which means:

• Capture Entire Screen
• Capture Selected Window
• Capture Selected Portion
• Record Entire Screen
• Record Selected Portion

Select the options you want, then hit the Record button(not showing in the screenshot) on the right side of the Options button.

But notice that the shortcut is only available in macOS Mojave and afterward. So if nothing happened after you press the combined key, we need to use Quick Time Player.

Quick Time Player

Open Quick Time Player, go to File -> New Screen Recording. If the combined key above works then this will brings you the exact same UI.

Here are the steps if the combined key wouldn’t work: https://support.apple.com/guide/quicktime-player/qtp97b08e666/10.4/mac/10.13

Record directly within Unity

This is the method I recommend, it is pretty straightforward and you can export super-scaled video up to 4K or more.

Unity officially released a recording tool to record play mode content.To get the tool, in Unity go to Window -> Package Manager -> search for Unity Recorder.

Here shows the main UI of the window. You pretty much don’t need to change anything here to record a video. You can put the file name, resolution, framerate as you want here. And it shows you where the recorded video will be.

By clicking the START RECORDING button, the Unity starts play mode, the video will be recorded. When you have done the record, exit the play mode.

Recommended Video Parameters

Framerate

Frame rate (expressed in frames per second or FPS) is the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images called frames to appear on a display. The term applies equally to film and video cameras, computer graphics, and motion capture systems. Frame rate may also be called the frame frequency, and be expressed in hertz. (Source: Wikipedia)

So in a sentence, a video in 60 FPS means that it shows 60 static images by order every second on your screen.The higher the FPS, the more fluid your video will be.

Here is an example shows a comparison of 12 FPS and 30 FPS.

12 FPS

30 FPS

Notice that while a higher FPS gives a better experience, it can increase the size of the video file, a lot. You probably don’t want to send a large file to your friend via a network with low connection speed, so in that case, you may want to consider lower framerate.

In conclusion

• For high-quality and videos that may be used with VR headsets, I recommend 60 FPS.
• For lesser quality videos and GIF-like animated sequence, I recommend going with the situation and filesize in mind, anything from 12 to 30.

Resolution

Here it shows the most common resolutions of videos and computer screens.The higher the resolution, the more details it shows.

So depending on the actual usage, you might want to balance because a higher resolution also means that the larger file size, especially you want to send the file to someone else who doesn’t have a good connection.

In conclusion

• For high-quality videos, I recommend at least 4K, there are some 8K videos available out there, but this is not common yet.
• For lesser quality video, I recommend going with the situation and filesize in mind, Full HD (1080) might be preferred otherwise regular HD (720).
• For GIF, anything that fits your needs.

Format and Codec

This might be a topic that makes this essay 10 times longer. So we wouldn’t dig this too much here but only provides simple advice on the choice of video format. However, an essay explained in detail about codec and format is provided for people who want to make sure he/she acquires the knowledge.

So in everyday life most probably the video format you will see are MP4, WMV, MOV, MKV, and FLV. In terms of recording a video and to be able to send the video to someone else, you can trust that an mp4 video file can be played well on most of the modern computers. If the software you’re working on provides an option to select the codec, H.264 is recommended.

WMV is a sort of Microsoft thing, so you can trust that a Windows computer with Windows Media Player can play the WMV file. MOV file, which developed by Apple, which can be played with macOS builtin Quick Time Player.

So if you want to learn more about what a codec is, and why MP4 is more a container instead of video format, check the link here:https://www.borrowlenses.com/blog/video-file-formats/

In conclusionFor being largely supported across most platforms, I recommend using MP4 (that allows video streaming by the way) with the codec H.264 which is the most commonly supported codec as of today.

References

The aim for this page is to be a community driven project that is work in progress and hopefully should show a list of games that will and will not work on Linux from porting it manually.

Warning: Some games may end up not working in future, so buy with care!

From Unity 4, Linux is supported target platform for Unity games. Since Unity is based on Mono, only appropriate Linux executables are needed, so it is possible to manually 'port' a Unity game made for another platform, that does not ship with Linux executables by locating and placing appropriate executable, as long as the game have OpenGL, OpenGLES or Vulkan renderer enabled, uses GLSL or SPIR-V shaders and doesn't use plugins that are impossible to obtain for Linux.

For older Unity 5+ games before Metal, porting from Mac version can alleviate the problems with pink shaders, since instead of DirectX/Direct3D HLSL shaders common OpenGL GLSL shaders were used.

• 1Porting a Windows or Mac game
  • 1.3Obtaining Unity files

Porting a Windows or Mac game

Obtaining game files

First, files for the game to port needs to be obtained. Unless trying to fix a broken Linux game or add support for 32-bit or 64-bit for games shipping with only 32-bit or 64-bit executable in Linux (which should be possible by adding the respective files), files for the Windows or Mac version of the game need to be obtained. If the game is installed on Windows, Mac or Wine/Proton, these files can be used. If not, it is usually possible to download (and extract if they are archived) the files under Linux natively:

• For Steam, use Proton (macos-depot-download for Mac), SteamCMD or Steam console to download a Windows or Mac depot (search SteamDB for the actual depot numbers of the game). It is also possible to download an old version of the game that way.
• For GOG.com, download a Windows installer and extract its files using innoextract --gog setup_whatever_game.exe[1]. For Mac, most (if not all) installers come as .pkg files, which are in fact xar archives. After extracting its contents, the next step is to find a file called 'Scripts' in a subdirectory (cannot remember its exact name right now), which is actually a gzipped cpio archive. After renaming it to Scripts.gz, gunzipping it, and extracting the resulting cpio archive, it is possible to finally get to the game content [2].
• For itch.io, download and extract a Windows version with 7z x Game.exe. For Mac, simply extract the .zip file, ex. unzip Game.zip.
• For Mac's .dmg files, mount them with sudo mount -o loop,ro -t hfsplus image.dmg mountpoint.
• For other sources, extract Windows installers with innoextract, 7za or similar tools.

For Windows games, obtained folder structure with GameName.exe and GameName_Data is the same as Linux.

For Mac games, the file structure is different and it is needed to move and rename some files around [3]:

The executable is stored in GameName.app/Contents/MacOS/GameName, but it will not be used. The rest of the files are not needed, as they will be replaced with contents from the Linux Unity player later on.

GameName is the Unity project game name. Renaming Linux executables to it will be needed later on.

Checking Unity version of the game

Secondly, a version of the Unity the game is using needs to be checked. Probably the easiest way is to use find-engine.py Python script from https://github.com/vetleledaal/game-engine-finder but it can also be done without it by at least two ways:

• Navigate to the GameName_Data folder of the game to be checked. Inside this folder there should be multiple of files, most of which contain the string for the Unity version. Executing strings command on one of them can help getting the exact version. Majority of games include level0 file in them, so navigating to the folder and executing this command should print the actual Unity version on the terminal:If nothing is returned, it's a very old Unity engine version, which has the version information towards the end of the file, but for which no Linux support exists anyway.
• If any Linux Unity Player executable is available, it is possible to put this executable in the same level as GameName.exe and GameName_Data and launch the game from terminal or with -logfile /location/to/file.txt command line parameter to force the game write a log to /location/to/file.txt and inspect the output. A similar to this should be looked for in log:Expected version is the version of the executable, in that case Unity Patch Release 5.6.3p3.
  Actual version is the version of the executable needed, in that case Unity Patch Release 5.6.4p1.
• Also, PCGamingWiki keeps track of Unity games engine build versions via Property:Unity engine build – it is possible to look at which games have the specific version there. To see the list of games along their Unity engine version, this query can be used. Keep in mind that the data there is contributed by users, so it can be out of date and not all the games may have it filled properly! The date of last version check can often be found noted as a reference on actual pages.

Obtaining Unity files

Knowing the exact game version, Unity Linux Playback Engine files needs to be obtained. These can either be taken from another Linux Unity game of the same version, or can be extracted from official Unity Linux Build Support ~100 MB exectuable (Unity 5+) or ~1.5 GB Unity Editor (Unity 4).

The files that are essential to work are:

For 32-bit version:

How To Export Unity Game For Windows On Mac Windows 10

• GameName.x86 (.x86 part is sometimes omitted in newer Unity versions, leaving only GameName in some games)
• GameName_Data/Mono/x86/libmono.so
• GameName_Data/Mono/x86/libMonoPosixHelper.so (since Unity 5.5)
• GameName_Data/Plugins/x86/ScreenSelector.so (since Unity 4.3)

For 64-bit version:

• GameName.x86_64 (.x86_64 part is sometimes omitted in newer Unity versions, leaving only GameName in some games)
• GameName_Data/Mono/x86_64/libmono.so
• GameName_Data/Mono/x86_64/libMonoPosixHelper.so (since Unity 5.5)
• GameName_Data/Plugins/x86_64/ScreenSelector.so (since Unity 4.3)

Sometimes additional .so plugin files need to be put in either the GameName_Data/Plugins/x86 directory for 32-bit version or GameName_Data/Plugins/x86_64 for 64-versions. It's not needed in most cases, but if the game needs them, the names can be deducted from .dll files stored in GameName_Data/Plugins directory for Windows, or from .bundle directories in GameName.app/Contents/Plugins for Mac.

Some common plugins include [4]:

• AkSoundEngine.dll – ???.so. There's a lot of versions of precompiled plugins available, but it's difficult to find out which one might be needed. Part of Audiokinetic.
• CSteamworks.dll – libCSteamworks.so. Available from GitHub - rlabrecque/Steamworks.NET: Steamworks wrapper for Unity / C#.
• fmod.dll – ???.so. There's no source, only precompiled plugins for 32 and 64-bit. Difficult to find the one needed. Available from FMOD Download - FMOD for registered users.
• FMODUnity.dll – ???.so. Source is available from FMODUnity .NET Plugin at SquareTangle (archived by Wayback Machine).
• steam_api.dll – libsteam_api.so. Access to the Steam API by itself. It is only needed to find this precompiled file.
• SteamworksManaged.dll???.so(32-bit only). Available from GitHub - reallyjoel/Ludosity-s-Steamworks-Wrapper: Fully managed .NET wrapper for Steamworks API.
• SteamworksNative.dll???.so (32-bit only). Available from GitHub - reallyjoel/Ludosity-s-Steamworks-Wrapper: Fully managed .NET wrapper for Steamworks API.
• UWKPlugin.dll – ???.so. Source is available, but no precompiled Linux plugins. Used to be available from uWebKit/uWebKit · GitHub (archived by Wayback Machine).
• XInputInterface.dll – ???.so. Apparently comes from speps/XInputDotNet: C# wrapper around XInput, works with any Mono or .NET application (eg. Unity3D).

File archives

Some people already extracted the appropriate files. It is possible to either look for the pre-made versions posted on the game forums if someone already did the job (see the table below), but there are also some mirrors of the extracted Unity files, which saves the trouble downloading and extracting the Linux Playback Engine or Unity Editor files or rummaging through the collection of Linux Unity games:

How To Export Unity Game For Windows On Mac Desktop

• Builds / Облако Mail.Ru – original file repository, includes some precompiled plugins.
• ! Builds / Облако Mail.Ru – another file repository.

Manually extracting files

It is also possible to also manually extract the files needed. For that, appropriate version of UnitySetup-Linux-Support-for-Editor-X.Y.Z.ab.exe needs to be downloaded (for Unity 5+) or either UnitySetup-4.Y.Z.exe for full releases or UnitySetup_update-4.Y.Zab.exe for patch/beta releases, where X.Y.Zab and similar is the Unity version detected.

First, the appropriate version of Unity from one of those locations needs to be obtained:

• Full Releases (X.Y.Zf1^*—∞)
• Patch Releases (X.Y.Zp1—∞)
• Beta Releases^** (X.Y.Zb1—∞ for Beta versions and X.Y.Zf1—∞ for Release Candidate versions)
• Linux Releases (X.Y.Zx^***f/p/b1—∞)

^*Some full releases start with with number higher than 1, that means that the previous versions were release candidates, obtainable from beta archive.
^**Only the current beta releases are available for download, so if an old beta executables is needed, then unless it is 5.4.0b10, 5.4.0b13, 5.4.0b15, 5.4.0b16, 5.4.0b18, 5.4.0b21, 5.4.0b23, 5.5.0b1, 5.5.0b2, 5.5.0b5, 2017.2.0b11, 2017.3.0b1, 2018.1.0b8, 2018.1.0b13, 2018.2.0b2, 2018.2.0b5 or 2018.2.0b7 available from Linux Releases, archived release somewhere else or another game using it needs to found (see Finding files in own game library section).
^***The xb/xf/xp notation was only used for the Linux Editor builds of Unity 5.5.0p1—2017.1.1f1 (inclusive) and 2017.2.0b6 – i.e. the builds published between 2016-12-13 and 2017-09-05.

• For Unity 5 and above, Unity Setup for Linux weighting around 100 MB needs to be downloaded. To do so, the version needed needs to be located on the links above, then URL to any component download link (except the Unity Installer for full releases, as it uses a different download scheme link) contains 12-character hexadecimal build ID, for example d597d0924185 for Unity 2017.1.2p4. Knowing the build ID, it is possible to download UnitySetup-Linux-Support-for-Editor-X.Y.Zab.exe from the following link:orxxxxxxxxxxxx is the build ID and X.Y.Zab is a detected Unity version. Generally, regular link works for full releases while beta and patches releases use the latter link, but sometimes the files are even available in both locations.
  Relative location of files Unity downloader downloads is also stored in unity-win.ini file which can be acccssed inor
  Alternatively, is is also possible to access the links in a more human-readable format (only in beta.unity3d.com) inHere are examples for Unity 2017.1.2p4:
  • UnitySetup-Linux-Support-for-Editor-2017.1.2p4.exe (download.unity3d.com))
  • UnitySetup-Linux-Support-for-Editor-2017.1.2p4.exe (beta.unity3d.com))

• For Unity 4, a full executable needs to be downloaded, weighting around 1.5 GB.

After obtaining the installers, files from them needs to be extracted. The archives are an NSIS installers and can be extracted with p7zip. Navigate to the location of the downloaded file for example using cd in terminal and extract the files with e.g. 7z x UnitySetup-version.exe, where version is either the respective version of Linux Support for Editor for Unity 5+ or the full installer for Unity 4 downloaded. For Unity 5+, the files needed will be located in $INSTDIR$_XX_/Variations/ folder, where XX is a random number, and for Unity 4 in Data/PlaybackEngines/linuxstandalonesupport/Variations/ folder. The variations needed are most likely the linux64_withgfx_nondevelopment_mono and/or linux32_withgfx_nondevelopment_mono, but feel free to experiment.

There is a bash script to automatically handle downloading and extracting the required files by passing only the Unity version. It repeats the procedures explained above and was posted on the original Russian forums, but it is largely untested: [5] (click 'скрытый текст' to show it). Dependencies include: p7zip-full (p7zip in Arch), curl, grep, cut, tr.

Only the files mentioned in Obtaining Unity files section are needed, so feel free to remove the rest – replacing the files that ship with Windows game may result in game not starting otherwise!

Renaming LinuxPlayer to GameName and Data directory to GameName_Data is also needed, where GameName is the game name (see Obtaining game files section.)

Finding files in own game library

An alternative route is to search through own installed game library, looking for the executables needed. When looking for a specific executablea following command can be typed in terminal, where . indicates the current directory and can be changed to a different one and X.Y.Zab is the executable searched for:

This command will only scan the directory in which it is invoked (or passed instead of .) and all its sub-directories, so it's a good idea to run it where all the games are installed (e.g. ~/games).[6][7]

Porting from other platforms

It could also be possible to port games from other platforms, including Android, iOS, tvOS, Samsung Smart TV, Tizen, WebGL, Facebook Gameroom and historically Unity Web Player – possibly even consoles if one could get hands on the files. It may also be possible to port to non-Linux platforms that way, however it all mostly remains to be tested.

How To Export Unity Game For Windows On Mac Download

The Russian Mac porting guide did not succeed porting an Android game to a x86 system due to a different CPU architecture, so an ARM Linux distro (for example on Raspberry Pi) may be needed [8].

Testing

How To Export Unity Game For Windows On Mac Os

TODO - write about -logfile and possibly other command line parameters. [9][10], [11]

Cosmetics

TODO - Write about converting images, icons and making desktop shortcuts. [12], [13], [14]

Games tested

Here are all the games tested for working on Linux. For now, the table only includes one entry per game, sorted alphabetically by game name – in case of new tests, update the existing entry with up to date info. Link the game name to the source you obtained the game from. Alternatively, if you feel the results are vastly different, feel free to add a new entry below the old test and discuss it in the talk page!

Feel free to add pre-Unity 4 games to the list as well and mark them appropriately – it will let other tester know why this Unity game does not work and in case of engine upgrade, could be easily retested.

For Platform column, state the platform you used the files from, most commonly Windows or Mac but other options are possible as well – see Porting from other platforms section.

Only use Yes in the Works column if the game is actually playable as if it were native. If you encounter any game-breaking issues such as game not starting or pink shader textures, mark it as a firm 'No' and state the reason in Description column – try to be as descriptive as possible, in case that will help someone else to get the game working by finding the issue.

For tester name, type the last tester name. If you are the one doing tests, you can use your wiki name, e.g. User:Faalagorn.

For the last tested date use YYYY-MM-DD format.

Games with the shader problems would basically require to decompile Managed/Assembly-CSharp.dll and replace the shaders to use there, or to extract the .asset files and create them anew. Some of these games are playable as they are, but certain things will show up pink. [15]

External links

• Engine:Unity/Porting - PCGamingWiki PCGW - bugs, fixes, crashes, mods, guides and improvements for every PC game – the same guide posted on PCGamingWiki
• Инструкция по 'портированию' игр на движке Unity3D :: RuTracker.org – the original guide, explaining how to port Linux games (in Russian).
• Windows Unity-Games on Linux – the original English guide, based on the above.
• MyKubik: Портируем игры Unity 3D для Linux – guide explaining how to port macOS/OS X games under Arch (in Russian).
• Running non-Linux Unity3D games on Linux (and natively) – GOG.com forums write-up.
• - Unity3D games that can be run natively on Linux - GOG.com (archived by Wayback Machine).
• Engine:Unity – engine overview and a dynamic list of games using Unity based on PCGamingWiki pages.