Guild Wars 2 for wine - what is needed?

[J V]

Did you happen to be using xfce? I noticed that windowed it would work every time, fullscreen every other time, and Vdesktop never and I was thinking it might be a WM related issue.

Also, I never noticed the slices under 1.5.9 so I'm recompiling that with the trading post patch (Also because 1.5.11 added a new version of alsa causing underruns and even full pa crashes in precise and previous versions)

PS: could you add specific address of the key and is it a string, dword, binary value, etc? What I put in isn't working...

Edit: 1.5.9 and the lines still occur, tell me, do you use nvidia and did you recently upgrade your graphics drivers to 304.43?

On another note: Why did they split these up in the first place? It could have only caused performance issues if they produce extra triangles

[J V]

When I run:
$ wine gw2.exe

Run it with the -dx9single flag:

Code: Select all

$ wine gw2.exe -dx9single

[JaqFrost]

I'm using Unity since I'm currently with Ubuntu 12.04 and yes I have the Nvidia 304.43 drivers installed which seems to perform better than the older ones Ubuntu uses. As for the key it's a string as you can also see at http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys. I've only ever tried 1.5.11 and 1.5.12 with the raw input and chromium patches but am gonna try 1.5.9 to see about them sliced lines as well.

[coteyr]

Hey guys, I'm new to Mac and Wine, but not new to PC or tech in general. A friend of mine runs a Mac and has been asking me to help him install GW2 on his Macbook (no idea if it will even be up-to-par graphically, but all he cares about is trying - he'll crank graphics down to minimum if he has to). Being fairly savvy with PCs I figured it couldn't be that difficult, but I am encountering a few hiccups.

Sorry if any of this has already been addressed earlier in the thread.

I have Wine installed as well as all the necessary prerequisite stuff like MacPorts and XCode. It looks like Guild Wars 2 is properly installed as I can ls the Program Files/Guild Wars 2 folder and it shows the gw2.exe file.

When I run:
$ wine gw2.exe

It launches XQuartz with the patcher, but it hangs at 0/0 and eventually just goes black.

What's my issue and how can I fix it?

As a long time win user who got a mac about 2 years ago, and came off linux, I thought I would give you a couple of tips. First, these tips are to make your life easier as a user. I don't mean to say that they are the "proper" way, or the only way.

OS X is really an opinionated OS. Your supposed to only "want" to do things one way, and if that way doesn't work or isn't available then "you" did something wrong, not anything in the OS. I mention that because your first mistake was trying to fit OS X into the "PC" world. Now OS X is a POSIX compliant OS (I think), so there is a lot that is like linux, but there is also a ton that is not. Again the only reason I go into that is because coming off linux I had a hard time adjusting to the idea that I was doing something wrong, just because my computer didn't have that function. This is compounded, for me at least, by the fact that I write software for a living so when I came across something that wasn't the way I wanted it, I started really changing things. I don't want you to fall into the same trap.

So back story aside (I just didn't want you to think I was randomly saying crap for no reason, or that I was saying you did something wrong, I am just trying to help, and I hate when OS X users get all "entitled" with no good reason), here are a few things:

• There truly is no reason to compile. Unless you want to change things or apply patches your self, compiling is a long process and MacPorts, while usable is also very "unstable" and can cause all kinds of problems if your not extremely careful what your doing.
• TIME MACHINE - If it's not running, go smack your self with a stupid stick. Backups couldn't be any easier. MacPorts/homebrew has the potential to change a lot of things. Specially when used incorrectly. Once time I installed amarok and made it so my machine couldn't boot, all because I installed some dependancies incorrectly.
• http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/ Use it (sounds like you already are) over what comes in/with the OS. Mountain Lion comes with nothing so that is easier. I find it has better acceleration, and runs smoother with wine then other X Windows servers.
• http://www.playonmac.com/en/ Installes wine versions, and acts as a pretty decent manager to wine. It also installs in "the mac way" of just dropping the .app into the Applications folders, and stores all the "wine files" in the proper OS X friendly locations (~/Library/Application Support/.....)
• Wineskin is another alternative. You can create a wineskin that will allow you to run GW2, and share it with others. I am sure there is already one out there, but if not you could create one. This is harder then Play on Mac, but not as hard as MacPorts or compiling etc.
• Both wineskin and Play on Mac, create little "fake" OS X .app(s) in your ~/Applications folder so you can start the game the "OS X way" via a launcher, or spotlight, or that silly 5 fingers launchpad. Don't underestimate the importance of this.
• MacPorts and XCode should really only be used by people that know what it's for and how to use it, or when there is no other choice. I hate to say that, because I am a huge fan and supporter of FOSS in my own way, but it's not like linux where it's installed already or easily installable. The long term problems that can arise from MacPorts usage can be quite severe (more so if your "experimenting"), and XCode can be a real PIA too if your not careful.

So to recap, your best chance of success for someone using mac that is not really skilled in software development of has little experience tinkering with his mac (which sounds like the case because of your statements): Install Play on Mac, download a binary version of wine (there are some benefits to a closed hardware platform), and then just install it and go.

The gw2.dat file (the big one) can be copied and moved should you want to try different methods of installing. The Play on Mac settings for Guild wars 2 seem to be spot on. You can most likely contribute, if desired and find some special setting that works really well, but you can also avoid hours of hardship and waiting, and get to restarting the launcher with much less stress and complication. Specially to the end user (friend) who didn't know enough or wasn't inclined to read the tutorials and handle the issue on their own.

As for performance, I get a little better in windows via bootcamp then I do in wine, but the game is very playable in wine. I use full screen mode in XQuartz and medium settings, and have gotten to play enough to be happy. The launcher is a major PIA, and the FPS is a tiny bit lower (2 - 8 fps to be exact) but other then that it works quite well.

Again, I hope that my advice helps, and I don't mean to suggest that your doing things the wrong way. At least not exactly. But in OS X there are "better of OS X" ways then mac ports, that are more integrated and more user friendly.

[J V]

Yeah with or without xvidmode and vdesktop the results are the same - vdesktop never works, fullscreen works half the time, windowed works all the time.

If there was an easy way to make the game on top-max res I'd take it but I think my WM (xfwm4) dislikes attmepts at that.

[JaqFrost]

Spent some more time toying around with things. Ran it on my laptop which is an ATI mobile HD4570 graphics to see that also suffers of the sliced lines but rather in a grid pattern. So it's looking like it's possibly not a driver thing since my desktop is a Nvidia GTX680. Also when trying wine 1.5.9 the lines where still there so I'm back to 1.5.12 since it didn't seem to differ.

Mouselooking on the laptop suffered the same disfunctional fate, although every third time instead of every other. Even tried the windowed fullscreen as the resolution to which it didn't remedy. My dual screen with that one reg setting to have it on the one monitor still works without a hitch. So I figure that it thinks it's windowed since Twinview makes the desktop see it as a single 3840x1200 screen instead of 2 1920x1200 screens. Windowed mode on the laptop pretty much crashes and currupts the video output badly so I couldn't see how that worked out.

Also took some time to play with varying registry settings in wine to see the results. Out of the majority of Direct3D ones listed at http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys the only one to clear up the lines was the OffscreenRenderingMode setting by making it backbuffer instead of fbo. It just carries a way worse problem of only having the top left 75% of the screen render the game along with transparent items having odd texture issues. In the end I'll stick with the annoying lines when in linux.

As for the fonts in the trading post window it's more readable if you increase the UI size in the game options. Playing under windows also suffers this same readability issue and worsens with a smaller UI setting. There is a font replacement registry entry for wine though but I don't know what the font name is for the text in the trading post window.

Overall, I'm kinda done trying to tweak this further and am content enough with how the game runs under wine but would be nice to see improvements.

[J V]

I would assume the lines are a texture projection rather than actually splitting the models up (That would drastically drop performance)

If someone with WM know-how would show up they could probably tell us the mouse problem right off.

Performance will take a massive upturn (A factor of 3 on my machine putting my theoretical framerate around 60 - 150 fps idle, 30fps min) if this bug is solved - note the stub on GetLogicalProcessorInformation. I don't know how hard it would be to write that but if codeweavers can't do it I'll take a stab given a potential improvement like that.

I'd rather not up the window size to fix TP - and it's (bearly) legible at the moment.

One thing I've noticed is that upping camera sensitivity lowers your chance of hitting the side of the screen when rightclicking (You usually only have to turn 180 degrees) if you can put up with the imprecision.

[maxxime]

Hi !

I have some tricks that helps the game to be more playable ( at least, it works on my setup ).

1 - have a separate filesystem for your games ( /opt is perfect for that ), idealy on a different disk than your system, and set the flag "noatime" in /etc/fstab .
I have seen that GW constantly load things ( even in native OS ), an desactivating the update of the access time helps the game to be less "laggy"

#### e.g. :
/dev/sysvg/opt /opt ext4 noatime,commit=0 1 2


2 - I have remark that affecting dedicated differents CPU cores with the "taskset" utility to the Gw2.exe and wineserver processes helps to have some extra FPS. I have also remark that setting more than 4 core to Gw2.exe does not helps, and less than 3 have a negative performance impact.

I start Gw2 with this line :

taskset -c 0-3 env WINEPREFIX="/home/maxime/.wine" WINEDEBUG=-all wine D:\\GUILD\ WARS\ 2\\Gw2.exe -dx9single & sleep 3 ; taskset -cp 7 `ps -ef | grep wineserver | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

-> I set wineserver on one core of my CPU ( 4 cores + 4 extra thread on my i7 870 ) : taskset -cp 7 $PID
-> I set Gw2.exe on the last 4 threads of my CPU : taskset -cp 0-3 $PID

Hope this helps

And by the way, please forgive my bad english... I'am just a french frog

[sxe]

I don't know how hard it would be to write that but if codeweavers can't do it I'll take a stab given a potential improvement like that.

If you consider the age of this ( http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11674 ) ticket, i would not bet on a solution in the near future. If you need help testing anything let me know, i have a i7 quadcore CPU. (You can shoot me a message at freenode as well)

btw, GW2 uses more than on CPU on my system. At least it seems like that. I see activity on all cores when running the game but they do not run at 100%. (I checked that with "htop").

[J V]

Yes it's running as a single thread, the kernel is spreading it across cores to give it a small speed boost.

Actually, that thread, there are tons of patches for it but they're game specific so they weren't pushed to trunk... You know what, it's playable, I'm not gonna muck with it, let codeweavers do it

[marvalis]

Bug 11674

Running World of Warcraft in wine on a multicore/SMP system results in multiple
threads being used, however, only one CPU is given significant tasks.

Seems like the exact opposite story. Are you sure these are the same bug?

[sxe]

Bug 11674

Running World of Warcraft in wine on a multicore/SMP system results in multiple
threads being used, however, only one CPU is given significant tasks.

Seems like the exact opposite story. Are you sure these are the same bug?

To me, that looks like exactly the same problem. At least on my system it seems like that.
In GW2 i get multiple threads but not all cores are at 100% (or near it).

@J V
fair enough

[Fibonacci]

I had uninstalled Gw2 after the last beta, and am now trying to install it under WINE. Unsuccessfully I might add.
Not only will the installer crash after only five seconds (whereas for the beta it would last a whole half hour), but the "Files remaining" count doesn't go below 218,396, even after running and killing the installer a hundred times.

How can I solve this?

[coteyr]

I had uninstalled Gw2 after the last beta, and am now trying to install it under WINE. Unsuccessfully I might add.
Not only will the installer crash after only five seconds (whereas for the beta it would last a whole half hour), but the "Files remaining" count doesn't go below 218,396, even after running and killing the installer a hundred times.

How can I solve this?

You can't, wait for a patch, copy over the file from windows, or just keep trying. Known issue and bug.

[maxxime]

Just seen on the short log :

13 hours ago Henri Verbeetuser32: Add rawinput mouse support.



I'll give it a try as soon as possible !

[J V]

Wait what? They actually added it to main wine? NO. WAY.

[sxe]

Wait what? They actually added it to main wine? NO. WAY.

They did but its not usable so far. Have a look at the last comment in that bug report.
The problem is that now the raw3.patch is broken so we cannot build WINE from GIT anymore. :/
Hope they will fix that soon, i'm so happy someone is working on that.

[J V]

I still can't post on bugzilla, could someone ask voidcstr at http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31691 if setting WINEDEBUG="-all" helps?

I had a performance issue caused by a bottleneck from wine pumping out hundreds of fixme and error lines while turning the camera.

[Bobby3369]

Hello
My System is a Intel 8500 Cpu
with a Radeon 5770 GPU Card
Memory 6 GB Ram
i use xubuntu and try to install GuildWars2 with different Wine Versions latest 1.5.13
but the install breaks up with a black screen....
i read to start Wine with the --dx9single command same result...
any ideas ??

[Chris-WF]

Bobby3369

this game should run good with your cpu (Quad Core E8500?) with 10 to 40 fps. I suppose that you run in this issue because you use Gw2setup.exe and not Gw2.exe?

Try the Gw2.exe you will find it here:

http://cloudfront.guildwars2.com/client/Gw2.exe

You have to create a directory (like GuildWars2) and move or save the file there, because the installer don't ask you where you like to install the game. Bye executing Gw2.exe it save the files in the same directory.

Edit:
Few minutes ago i read about Guild Wars 2 in the Wine Application Database and i wonder why someone (Sabun) with a AMD Phenom II x4 965 3.4GHz, complain about 1 to 10 fps. The game itself have different locations with different needs. And that bad fps i got only in Lion Arch or in some beginner areas. Mostly i could play with my i5, 3.1 GHz CPU with 20 to 40 fps. I edit this to clarify about your expected fps, will not disappoint you.

[Bobby3369]

Thanks Chris
it help´s a little.
But when i run the GW2.exe to Program stops by 5 percent and generate a Error Message (Error 7.0.0.0 ??)
i try it a number of times allways with the same result.
Any ideas to solve the problem ??

[Chris-WF]

The Error Message 7.x.x.x is or should be related to your Internet connection. I'm not sure how true this messages are.

http://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/an ... /errorcode

At Guild Wars 2 release users got often connection issues massages because of server issues. But actual my connection works fine and the Guild Wars 2 Servers should run fine too. Check your firewall and the way you use Internet. Maybe you really need Portforwarding to got this work.

[Bobby3369]

Finally Guild wars2 is running.
I use a Videotutorial and copy the Guild Wars2folder from my Windows installation into the C: Drive from my Play on Linux Subsystem.
The Framerate is realy poor but playable (Rata Sum 17-20 FPS Radeon HD5770 Card)
So i will hope that future versions of wine will bring a speed up.

[Shahrizai]

Is the Trading Post working for anybody?

[Bobby3369]

@Shahrizai
no, i am back to Windows xp for playing GW2 and waiting for a better wine version to come ....