Running Half-Life: Alyx Workshop Tools on Linux

Overview

This guide will explain how to run Half-Life: Alyx tools on Linux

Introduction & Disclaimers

Half-Life: Alyx now has a native Linux port, but this does NOT include the workshop tools, so you’ll need to run the workshop tools through Wine.

Unfortunately the tools don’t run with proton, and the addon configurator doesn’t run at all, even with Wine, so we need to do some things manually. In addition, the tools are quite unstable, leading to MANY crashes, which makes them difficult to use to say the least.

Prerequisites

Before starting this guide, you should have the following:
1. A working brain & some experience with Linux
2. Wine installed (I’m running version 5.7)
3. A bit of internet bandwidth (We might need to reinstall some stuff)

Installing the Tools

The tools will only launch with wine, as said in the introduction, so you will need the windows binaries.

Steam doesn’t like to maintain multiple platforms for a game at the same time, unfortunately, so if you opt to install the workshop tools, your linux binaries will be removed. If you don’t care about your Linux binaries, feel free to skip to the next section.

I’ve written a couple of convenient scripts that will help you save and restore binaries before and after game updates.

The following script can be used to save your Linux binaries to the Half-Life: Alyx root directory. Save it as save-binaries.sh in your HLA game directory (steamapps/common/Half-Life Alyx/game/)

#!/bin/bash pushd `dirname $0` [ -z $1 ] && exit 1 echo “Creating versioned binaries for $1” # Go to the directory & create the binary archive tar -cvzf “$1.tgz” $(find bin/$1/) $(find hlvr/bin/$1/) # Move them to the game directory mv $1.tgz ../ popd

To run this, cd to Half-Life Alyx/game and run

./save-binaries linuxsteamrt64

You can substitute linuxsteamrt64 with any platform you want to save binaries for.
Now, you should have linuxsteamrt64.tgz in the root of your Half-Life: Alyx install.

At this point, we’ll want to install the workshop tools from steam. To do this, head over to your steam library, right click on Half-Life: Alyx, click on properties -> run with compatibility tool -> Proton and save. Next, go to the DLC tab and tick the workshop tools box.

It should download about ~500mb of stuff.

Once it’s installed, your previous linux binaries will be gone, so go ahead and cd to your HLA install directory again and run

tar -xf ../linuxsteamrt64.tgz ./

The only issue is that you won’t be able to run the linux version of the game from steam, so you have to run hlvr.sh from the game directory of your HLA install.

Creating a Mod

Unfortunately the HLA mod configuration tool won’t run on Wine, so you’ll need to manually create your mod directory.

cd into your HLA install again (the root, so the directory about game/) and cd into content.

The content directory will contain all of your mod folders, so let’s go ahead and create one now. For this example I’ll be creating a mod called testmod.

cd content mkdir hlvr_addons && cd hlvr_addons mkdir -p testmod/maps mkdir -p testmod/materials mkdir -p testmod/materials mkdir -p testmod/panorama mkdir -p testmod/particles mkdir -p testmod/soundevents

That’s all you need to do for this part!

Launching the Tools

Launching the tools is pretty straightforward luckily.

In the game directory of your HLA install, (Half-Life Alyx/game/) create a script called launch-tools.sh or something.
Put the following code in that script

#!/bin/bash pushd bin/win64 ARGS=”-dev -console -vconport 29000 -nosteam +sv_cheats -720 -publiccontent content -addon testmod -tools” wine hlvr.exe $ARGS popd

This script just launches HLVR with Wine. Here’s a description of the options:

Option

Function

-dev

Puts the game in developer mode, which enables some developer commands and script functions

-console

Enables the old VGUI2 console seen in HL2

-vconport 29000

Sets the vconsole port to 29000. You can launch vconsole.exe to have access to the console

-nosteam

Launches without steam

+sv_cheats

Enables sv_cheats

-publiccontent content

Sets the content directory to content

-addon testmod

Sets the addon to testmod

-720

Puts the game in 720p mode. You can omit this and replace it with -windowed -w <width> -h <height>

-tools

Launches the game in tools mode

That’s all for launching the tools! Be aware of how buggy they are though; they will crash often.

Postmortem

Please let me know if there are any mistakes or other errors in this guide, it really helps! Improvements are also welcome!

As of right now, we still need to figure out these things:

Uploading mods to the steam workshop
Launching the mod configurator
Fix the tool crashing
Running the tools with proton

Known Issues

Some issues with the tools on linux:

Tilesets do not render
Randomly crashes from time to time
Performance is like 50-75% of what it is on Windows

Half-Life: Alyx Guide