OpenStarbound AppImage 🐧

OpenStarbound URL	Starbound URL
Click here	Click here

Guide on how to build the portable OpenStarbound AppImage working on any Linux distro (with option to build vanilla Starbound too).

Important

This repo only hosts the build files and instructions on how to build OpenStarbound and vanilla Starbound.
Due to obvious legal reasons, we don't release AppImages directly and you need to provide legally acquired vanilla Starbound (from GOG) and OpenStarbound assets manually.

Motivation

Linux game installers provided by GOG are not something that I find as well done.
They are only good for providing DRM-free game files, but for running the games themself, they are bad.
Games packed by GOG don't bundle all necessary dependencies + libraries and they use LD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks.
This means that their Linux distro compatibility is based on luck and they are not portable in a single file like AppImage is.

Another motivation is that I think this makes it easier for people to install and try OpenStarbound.

Building

Requirements:

• x86_64 PC where building will occur
  • for example, cross-building x86_64 AppImage from aarch64 PC is not supported
• Linux version of Vanilla Starbound game assets from GOG installer
  • Steam version might also work, but it's not tested
• podman or docker installed in PATH
  • for pulling the Arch container needed to build the AppImage
• wget or curl installed in PATH
  • for downloading the Anylinux container AppImage setup action script
• awk installed in PATH
  • for parsing the Anylinux container AppImage setup action script

Building steps:

1. Open terminal
2. Change working directory where you want to save repo files (we'll use ~/Downloads in this guide)

• cd ~/Downloads

3. Clone this repo or download it manually and extract

• git clone https://github.com/pkgforge-dev/OpenStarbound-AppImage.git

4. Change working directory to the repo folder

• cd ./OpenStarbound-AppImage

5. Make game-files and OpenStarbound folders where the game assets are used

• mkdir game-files OpenStarbound

6. Outside of terminal, provide Starbound and/or OpenStarbound assets if not provided

• Starbound assets go into game-files folder in the repo
  • Starbound assets from GOG installer are located in ~/GOG Games/Starbound/game/* folder
• OpenStarbound assets go into OpenStarbound folder in the repo
  • OpenStarbound assets are located in these 2 folders after extracting tar files to ${PWD}:
    • ./OpenStarbound-Linux-Clang-Server/server/server_distribution/*
    • ./OpenStarbound-Linux-Clang-Client/client/client_distribution/*

7. Set executable permission to the build script

• chmod +x ./build-locally.sh

8. Run the building script depending if you want to build OpenStarbound or vanilla Starbound AppImage

• OpenStarbound (version is supplied for cosmetic purposes for the filename of the AppImage - defaults to 0.0.0 if not supplied):
  • OPENSTARBOUND_VERSION=0.1.14 ./build-locally.sh
• Vanilla Starbound (version is supplied for cosmetic purposes for the filename of the AppImage - defaults to 1.4.4 if not supplied):
  • STARBOUND_VERSION=1.4.3 OPENSTARBOUND=0 ./build-locally.sh

9. Building will begin. When it finishes, AppImage will be located in ./dist folder
10. Enjoy!

Tested:

• OpenStarbound 0.1.14
• Starbound 1.4.4

AppImage Game Notes

• Due to the nature of the AppImage format, saving directory for storage, mods and logs is changed to:
  • ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/starbound/storage/
  • ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/starbound/mods/
  • ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/starbound/logs/
• The above changes are applied and are overwritten to sbinit.conf on every app launch, as that's necessary for portable functionality to work. That means that this config is not for user modification.
  • ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/starbound/sbinit.config
• For the portable config and data above, you can make portable AppImage folders AppImage-Filename.share and AppImage-Filename.config next to the AppImage.

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More at: AnyLinux-AppImages