Guild Wars on Wine

From Guild Wars Wiki

Warning: Running Guild Wars on a non-Windows operating system, or with any other computer which does not meet the system requirements, is completely unsupported by ArenaNet and NCSoft.

Wine provides a win32 api implementation for operating systems not made by Microsoft and can be used to run Guild Wars on such systems. The following guide has been written with Linux in mind.

CrossOver is commercial version of Wine with official support of Guild Wars on Linux and MacOS using intel cpu.

Cedega, a DirectX optimized commercial wine fork, supports Guild Wars. For more information about Guild Wars on cedega you can visit their wiki.

[edit] Installation steps

[edit] Issue with some versions

Wine 1.1.21-1.1.26 had a bug that prevented Guild Wars from working properly. This was fixed in 1.1.27.

[edit] Get Wine

First, we'll need to download and install Wine on your system, if it isn't already there. Most modern Linux distributions come with their own package management system, making the installation of Wine a breeze. Here are some distribution-specific instructions:

It is recommended you use the latest stable Wine (or well tested development) release, which should be included in the package archive of your distribution. If you wish to use the latest development release, follow the instructions at the Wine downloads page. Note: The development release may include regressions which can prevent Guild Wars from working properly.

[edit] Configure Graphics driver

Check if the system uses your Video Card's 3d acceleration driver.

[edit] Get Guild Wars

[edit] Network install

Open a terminal window and download the Guild Wars installation program:

wget http://www.guildwars.com/downloads/gwsetup.zip
unzip gwsetup.zip

Then run gwsetup:

wine GwSetup.exe

Proceed with the installation, which will download the basic GW data.

[edit] Media install

Mount Guild Wars media and use winecfg to assign a "Letter" to the mount point. Then run Setup.exe from the media:

wine "D:\Setup.exe"

Where D: is the Letter for the media Drive Mapping. You may need to unmount and mount the next media yourself if wine failed to do so.

[edit] Running Guild Wars

To run Guild Wars after the installation, simply type this command from a terminal window:

wine "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"

You can use your system's menu editor to add a shortcut to the above command, so you don't have to manually run it from a terminal every time.

In case you experience problems when running Guild Wars, you may want to try tweaking with the configuration of Gw.exe or Wine.

[edit] Extra configuration

The process above will in the majority of cases land you with a working Guild Wars installation. However, for those systems where this doesn't happen, or where you are unsatisfied with the performance and want to try tinkering with the settings to get a better game experience, the following instructions may help.

[edit] Tuning xorg.conf

When using Intel onboard graphics like GMA 3100 disabling the option SwapbuffersWait in the device section can improve the performance.

Option "SwapbuffersWait" "false"

See man intel for the details about this option.

[edit] Tuning wine

Start winecfg and, if your hardware supports it, configure the following options.

In the Graphics tab Allow Pixel Shader and set Vertex Shader Support to Hardware. Also it is highly recommended that Allow the window manager to control the window be disabled, this will prevent common desktop hotkey to activate during play. (eg: Switch desktop, cycle window, ...)

If you're running a lower-spec machine, like a netbook, turn off pixel shader support and use the pbuffer for OSR instead. This will make the game look worse but perform better.

In the Audio tab enable the driver that support your audio hardware, ALSA Driver will work in most installation. The following audio options are recommended, Hardware Acceleration select Emulation and make sure Driver Emulation is checked.

[edit] Registry Settings

• Start wine regedit

If graphics freeze for short durations when moving or turning (loading new shaders):

• Create key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/wine/Direct3D", create string "UseGLSL", set value to "disabled". This hint applies to Wine 0.9.49 and later. Re-enable GLSL whenever upgrading to see if this performance issue was fixed, because graphics quality increases with GLSL enabled.

Enable Multi-sampling (Anti-Aliasing):

• Create key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/wine/Direct3D", create string "Multisampling", set value to "enabled".
• Within Guild Wars, enter Menu, Options, Graphics and chose desired Anti-Aliasing setting. Though the Guild Wars setting seems to be non-influential, it is good practice to keep it in sync.

If your GW screen turns black when Multi-sampling or post-process effects are enabled:

• Create key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/wine/Direct3D", create string "OffscreenRenderingMode", set value to "backbuffer". There seems to be no performance or quality penalty.

For a full reference of further registry keys, see http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys

[edit] Configuring Gw.exe

Wine implementation of Microsoft DirectX9 can be lacking in old versions. If that is the case, try running Gw.exe with the flags -dx8 -noshaders. You can also change the Windows version Wine emulates in the Wine Configuration panel. Several people have better luck getting it to work in Windows 98 mode than others. However this mode causes a massive number of graphics anomalies since the Eye of the North updates. It is possible to force Guild Wars to run in a window instead of fullscreen; this can be useful if you run into problems. To do this the flag -windowed is added to the gw.exe command. We will use this until we are satisfied with the results.

Also because Wine will generate a lot of debugging output when running, this can slow the game, environment variable WINEDEBUG will be set to -all (minus all) to prevent any debug output on the console.

WINEDEBUG=-all wine "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -windowed

[edit] Running on a separate X server

If you run Guild Wars on a separate X server, it doesn't interrupt other applications on other X servers. If Wine or Guild Wars crashes on one X server, the other remains unaffected. Since separate X servers can without or a different window manager than another, keys can be rebound and not get in the way of playing Guild Wars. If you usually run a compositing window manager (e.g. compiz), you might also see a speed increase, as the visual effect can be disabled on the other X server.

On the other hand, minimizing Guild Wars or switching to window mode won't work as expected any more - but you can switch between your regular desktop and Guild Wars anytime usually by using Ctrl-Alt-F7 / -F8 (your mileage may vary). Multiple X servers can also take up overall performance on slower machines.

If you like those features, do as follows: Create a text file containing the command to start Guild Wars, without the -windowed switch

#!/bin/bash
WINEDEBUG=-all wine "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"

save it, for example as ~/run_guildwars, and make it executable

chmod +x ~/run_guildwars

To start a second X server with Guild Wars running, execute this command (or add a corresponding shortcut or menu entry):

xinit ~/run_guildwars -- :1 -br