I’ve been using the Linux Editor for Unity3D for a few weeks now, and I’ve run into some odd bugs while doing so.

The first one is that mouse rotation has a very limited range – it’s basically limited to the screen size, which limits it to about a 90 degree field of rotation. This occurs in the Linux builds as well. There is a workaround, which is to recentre the mouse (i.e. when paused), but that’s pretty tedious.

I started working on a workaround for that, which is to use the arrow keys to rotate. As far as I remember, System Shock 2, Thief and Thief 2 allowed this as well, so that’s another reason for doing so. It works perfectly fine in the build, but not quite in the editor. What appears to happen is that the up and down keys cause the game tab to lose focus. And I’m not the only person who’s run into that.

Finally, I had a massive drop in framerate for no apparent reason. Even an empty scene got a massive hit of less than 40-50 FPS. However, this wasn’t an editor problem, but a graphics driver problem: my graphics card was using version 1:7.3.0-1ubuntu3.1 of the recommended X.Org X Server driver, but when I changed it to use the fglrx-updates driver and restarted, it worked absolutely fine. If you’re using an AMD/ATI graphics card and having a similar problem, give that a try.

There are also some minor issues such as the contents of a UI Text disappearing after losing and regaining focus (see the below images), but that is purely cosmetic, and the text reappears after you do anything like select the text in the hierarchy, or tweak something in the inspector if you have it already selected.

Finally, Application.persistentDataPath returns null in both editor and build, which is causing an issue with saving data. However, Application.dataPath and Application.persistentDataPath do work, so I have a workaround for this.

So far, however, it generally works.