[not a bug] Steam version of URW on Linux runs only from Steam

[yobbo]

I mentioned this in a comment on a dev news post but i'm putting full details here.

I installed URW via Steam, and when running it via Steam it works just fine. When running it outside Steam it won't start.

The error given was that it was lacking some SDL library (libSDL2_mixer-2.0.so.0), but of course Steam is able to start it so this library must be somewhere. Indeed after some searching i found it in "/home/yobbo/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu". However even when providing the path to the library when starting URW (via the command "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=[...]/x86_64-linux-gnu ./urw3-bin" which also found and used the libSDL2_image library) URW crashed immediately with a segmentation fault.

Steam must be doing something fancy to get URW to run.

After some experimentation i found that if i install libSDL2_mixer and libSDL2_image myself, URW does run normally outside of Steam. So i guess there's some incompatibility somehow between my system libraries and whatever Steam is using when it runs URW.

So... maybe not a bug as the standalone version downloaded from the website also requires me to install these libraries. But i would expect that there should be some way to make the version downloaded from Steam work without downloading new things, as it runs just fine when i run it via Steam.

This all actually caused an annoyance when i was on a plane, and i couldn't install any new libraries at all. Steam for some reason refused to start because it knew there was a Steam client update somewhere but couldn't get online to download it. That was a bug in Steam that i think was subsequently fixed, and this is all a bit of an edge case, but... it was pretty annoying and i expected that the game would run because i had installed and tested it earlier.

Not sure what could be done for it other than bundling SDL libraries with URW, or else somehow including a run script that does whatever fancy magic Steam is doing when it starts URW. I haven't been able to find out anywhere what that magic is.

[Sami]

It's not a bug, it's just how things are. Your system needs to have the relevant libraries to run the game.
Steam wisely doesn't want to install the crucial libraries in your system as default ones, as this is not necessarily preferred for some people, and the version mismatches might occur in some cases. We also can't add these libraries to download package as those are distro specific.
So, confusing it may have been but nothing to be done here. Luckily the SDL installation is easy and painless.