Guild Wars 2 Forum

Hello all!

I am putting test builds up for today's stress-test in this location:

http://www.codeweavers.com/xfer/GW2Test/

When prompted, enter the key:

guildwars

to access the downloads.

There are three builds: one for mac, two for linux. My hope is that they will address the camera movement issue. They are highly unsupported builds, but we hope to get something good from them. Please be careful with them if you have regular CrossOver installations - don't overwrite things, etc. etc., and don't use these for your other important personal data ... etc.

Getting the Launcher to Work

If you see either a 'white screen' or a 'black screen' when you start Gw2.exe, there is a known work-around. You must launch Gw2.exe from CrossOver's 'Run Command' menu. Be sure to select the correct bottle (the one into which Gw2.exe has been installed), then enter the path to the Gw2.exe executable. In the 'Run Command' text box where you entered the path to the executable, after the executable name, type one space, then the command-line option '-useoldlauncher' (with the dash, without the quotes).

Doing this will give you a 'white screen' instead of a 'black screen' during download. As mentioned elsewhere, download will fail several times but if you keep restarting you will eventually get what you need. You can view progress by simply using CrossOver's 'Window' menu to raise the window behind the 'white screen' to the front: that will give you a download progress bar. (On any given run it is unlikely to get past 10% - maybe only to 4%, maybe up to 13%, but several runs in a row will eventually get the game downloaded.)

For Linux:

The linux builds are marked with names 'plainri' and 'modifiedri'. I believe 'modifiedri' is the most likely one to work, but if that does not, 'plainri' would be a good test as well.

For Mac:

For Mac folks (where there is a lot of graphics trouble, I think), I uploaded another build to:

http://www.codeweavers.com/xfer/GW2Test/

(access key : guildwars)

The newest one is just called 'crossover-11.2.0.zip'

Please note that this, as all these builds are, this is highly unsupported: (not even built on our build servers, just on my laptop).

Also, changing to a special 'gw2' build for the last round was, I think, a mistake ease-of-use wise, so this one is just a regular 'CrossOver' build and will look in ~/Library/Application\ Support/CrossOver/Bottles for your GW2 bottle. So ... sorry for that hassle (deploying these 'special' builds to look in different config dirs is something we're experimenting with, not sure how well I like it ...).

At any rate, if there's a Mac user out there with graphics bugs, this build has some fresh hacks.

There is a new registry setting which this build will look for:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/FixedVShaderLimit

So, if you go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/ and make a string value called FixedVShaderLimit, you can play with something that seems to impact the graphics.

In my experience, setting it to 263 gives perfect graphics but bad framerates. (anything above 256 is thought to give bad framerates, but higher numbers are needed to avoid graphics problems. 261 (probably the same framerate) gave a few graphics glitches, but not as many as 256.

Two things would be useful to know:

1.) How bad, in your experience, is the framerate with this value set to 263 or higher? (really, playing with it above whatever setting makes the graphics render well shouldn't impact the framerate. Oh, but don't set it higher than 512 - this build doesn't check for that, but it might cause bad behavior).

2.) How low can you get it and still get reasonable gameplay, given the number of graphics glitches?

If you do end up experimenting with the above and report back here, please note that stating what your hardware & OS are (including video card) is helpful.

The particular issue this addresses is mac-only, so there's no linux equivalent to experiment with.

Cheers!

 Josh.

I tried to get the builds but it says the page is blocked and I need to log in or enter the key provided to you. Clearly I'm logged in, so how should I go about accessing them?

Whoops!

The key 'guildwars' (just the letters, not the quotes) will do it.

Sorry for being a complete noob, but what am I supposed to do with the files I downloaded? I opened the modifiedri one and nothing happened.

Oh. Those are .zip installers, just like what you download from the CodeWeavers.com website to install CrossOver.

Double-click on it and you should get a progress bar indicating that it is 'unarchiving' or 'extracting' or somesuch.

When that's done, the directory you downloaded to should have a 'CrossOvergw2.app' application. Click on that, and run it.

Oh! But wait ... and this is going to be a pain because of the way I built those things!!

You will then have to manually move your GuildWars2 bottle into the correct application directory. Uhg. I shouldn't have done the thing I did. (I was trying to avoid having these special hacked builds interfere with other things).

So ...

1.) open a Terminal.

Type the following (it has a lot of funny punctuation - just cut & paste it. If you have more than one Guild Wars 2 bottle, you will have to rename. Getting hard for a newbie, I know ... we'll make this easier for actual release)...

mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/CrossOver/Bottles/Guild\ Wars\ 2/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/CrossOvergw2/Bottles/

Then launch the CrossOvergw2.app that was extracted when you clicked on the file you downloaded.

Oh, also: the .zip files are for Mac users, the .bin ones for linux users.

Note!: for a newb: this will move your guildwars2 install out of anyplace that regular 'CrossOver' can see it. Only the special 'CrossOvergw2' build will be able to see it thereafter. To get your Guild Wars install back into your regular CrossOver, you can come back here and ask for help, if needed.

However! Remember that these guild wars builds are, for now, unsupported and can potentially cause problems for other things you may have installed with CrossOver (as this issue demonstrates). You will want to delete the CrossOvergw2.app once you are done testing Guildwars after today's event. Finally, and most importantly, if you are not comfortable testing something that could mess up the rest of your CrossOver install (and not comfortable possibly needing to put things back together again afterwords), you should probably just not use these builds at all. These are the 'bleeding edge', and, while we will help, caveat emptor with these ones ;)

How can we make CrossOvergw2 see the new bottle after migrating it manually?

(I actually copied my GW2 bottle since my GW2 data are not inside the bottle.)

EDIT: By restarting the application! Sorry for the noise.

so in Linux would i just drop my GW2 bottle into the cxofficegw2 folder or do i dive somewhere deeper into the directory?

You need to create the Bottles directory since it is not created by the application at first run. Then you can move your bottle inside the Bottles directory.

I tried the modified build for mac. I copied everything from my GuildWars2Beta folder (including the gw2.exe and the gw2.dat) into the new crossover bottle. When I ran the command -useoldlauncher which was working for me earlier i got a completely white screen. When I tried to go back to my other version of crossover I got the same thing. White screen no way to login.

On linux, just drop it in the ~/.cxofficegw2 dir.

On the mac, yes, you need to create a 'Bottles' directory if you migrated manually.

Your GW2 client may be updating... Wait until the installer crashes (every 10000 files downloaded) or starts the old GW2 login screen.

No, I had it working earlier. I tried creating a new character but had it crash, so I figured I'd try the test build. I can see the updater and I finished the update, but the actual game login screen is white. I can hear the music but can't login.

Josh DuBois wrote:

On linux, just drop it in the ~/.cxofficegw2 dir.

That worked beautifully. I used the modifiedri.bin and am able to move the camera with the mouse until it crashed.

Any specific logs we should be taking?

1.) You might want to try with the 'plainri' build as well - it would be interesting to know which you used. (Also, please remember which you used when creating logs.)

2.) logs: +win,+tid,+seh would be good.

Thanks for testing!

Cliff Kelley wrote:

No, I had it working earlier. I tried creating a new character but
had it crash, so I figured I'd try the test build. I can see the
updater and I finished the update, but the actual game login screen
is white. I can hear the music but can't login.

Have you tried passing '-useoldlauncher' to the gw2.exe program?

Yes, I did use the -useoldlauncher. I found out from another forum post that the white screen thing can be taken care of by selecting Window > Zoom from the top menu. Different problem it would seem, thanks for your help!

Ooh, thank you for the instructions! I got it working, and the in-game camera is working like a charm! Thank you so much for putting effort into fixing it, this makes playing a lot more enjoyable :)

Julia wrote:

Ooh, thank you for the instructions! I got it working, and the
in-game camera is working like a charm! Thank you so much for
putting effort into fixing it, this makes playing a lot more
enjoyable :)

I'm glad it works! May I ask:

1.) What kind of hardware are you on? (Mac OS version, type of Mac, graphics card?)

2.) Are you getting graphics glitches (strange shapes, white stripes, etc.), or no? If you get them, can you describe how badly they impact gameplay (do they make it terrible & unplayable, or only show up rarely and not really bother you, etc.)

3.) Which download did you use, do you recall? Was it the 'plainri' or the 'modifiedri' download?

Thanks!

Cheers,

 Josh.

Cliff Kelley wrote:

Yes, I did use the -useoldlauncher. I found out from another forum
post that the white screen thing can be taken care of by selecting
Window > Zoom from the top menu. Different problem it would seem,
thanks for your help!

How is gameplay going? May I ask whether you're using the 'plainri' build or the 'modifiedri' build? Also, can I ask what OS you're using, and what kind of graphics hardware you've got?

It seems that for most people the mouse / camera movement issue is fixed, but there are still graphics glitches that are bothering us. For some they seem bad, for others, less so. Trying to get a handle on that.

Camera is working for me too, but the texture stretching bug is back, with modified and plain.

Switching back to release CrossOver as the flickering is very annoying. I do have the "SafeVsConst" settings in my registry.

(Hardware specification in my signature.)

EDIT: Actually the texture stretching bug (9570) is back on regular CrossOver too.

ok so for starters i am running on Fedora 17 64bit Xfce with a Nvidia GTX260.

Mouse worked in modifiedri but crashed after about 5 minutes.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bch2v3yrqvnn22a/modified_gw2.txt

Mouse worked in plainri and never crashed for the half hour my girlfriend left me alone.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qchqdwdje50rfhr/plain_gw2.txt

Frames per second with horrible in each case which never seemed to go above 8fps and had the half gray and half green going on.

Yup. Using the regular Crossover (not one of your new builds) I suddenly have DREADFUL FPS and texture stretching is back (despite my registry's having the fixes). The mouse of course doesn't work, but since I'm using the regular build I expected that.
This is quite sad since the game ran really wonderfully for me before :/

Josh DuBois wrote:

Julia wrote:

Ooh, thank you for the instructions! I got it working,
and the in-game camera is working like a charm! Thank you so much
for putting effort into fixing it, this makes playing a lot more
enjoyable :)

I'm glad it works! May I ask:

1.) What kind of hardware are you on? (Mac OS version, type of Mac,
graphics card?)

2.) Are you getting graphics glitches (strange shapes, white
stripes, etc.), or no? If you get them, can you describe how badly
they impact gameplay (do they make it terrible & unplayable, or only
show up rarely and not really bother you, etc.)

3.) Which download did you use, do you recall? Was it the 'plainri'
or the 'modifiedri' download?

Thanks!

Cheers,

 Josh.

1. Mac OSX Lion 10.7.4
   iMac from 2010
   ATI Radeon HD 4670 256 MB

2. There are always some graphical glitches present (stretching of polygons/textures), but very rarely in such quantities that it would make it hard to see where I'm going.

3. The modifiedri one, didn't try the plainri at all.

Edit: oh, and I forgot to mention that the camera does work, but after a bit more testing I noticed that it can't be turned around 360 degrees. It only goes about 90 degrees when I turn it to the left and 180 degrees to the right. In one go that is, if I release the mouse button in-between I can keep turning it more.

Oh that's Cool!

First:
I will try this and collect some Logs too. Is the Chat-Freeze isse patched too?

Second:
The System_Performance-Call that crash the game in some Towns like Lion's Arch?

fixme:ntdll:NtQuerySystemInformation info_class SYSTEM_PERFORMANCE_INFORMATION

Thanks for Working!

By the Way there is another Stresstest, starting in less then five hours...

Chat freeze is a client bug (also happening in Windows), not Crossover/Wine related.

Chris2009 wrote:

Oh that's Cool!

Second:
The System_Performance-Call that crash the game in some Towns like
Lion's Arch?

fixme:ntdll:NtQuerySystemInformation info_class SYSTEM_PERFORMANCE_INFORMATION

FWIW, I believe that fixme line appears in logs near GW2 crashes as a symptom of the crash, but is unrelated to the cause.  Guild Wars creates an ArenaNet.log after most crashes, and populates that log with some system information.  The fixme above is related to the population of that log file (it looks like the NtQuerySystemInformation call is used to get things to put into the crash report).  It shows up after the crash has already happened.

So ... it's generally still useful to have logs from prior to this point - those are what may help reveal the actual cause (or, so I believe). 

so is it useful for you guys to see the ArenaNet.log? or just the logs generated through CX?

Usually just CX logs are good.

If anyone gets graphics glitches, a +d3d_shader log from a scenario where the glitches appear might also be good (and a screenshot of the bad graphics can help in that case, also).

If you think an ArenaNet log has something intersting, feel free to say so. In general, though, we can't do much with those.

http://bpaste.net/show/39624/

I am Sorry to say without talking to people and friends its not so nice to bring more testing-log's.

So i promise to post more if the thing with the chat will work. Hope this log will help you.

The game crash in this log after a press of enter and i used [i]modifidrie[/u]. The Mouse patch works fine, and the fixing in the center of my gamingwindow while holding right,too.

Fedora 17 64bit Xfce
Nvidia GTX 260

Running the plainri and took a couple screenshots.

Currently uploading the log i took with the +d3d_shader. That adds up quick so i only ran it a few minutes.

Here's a link to the log plainri_2_gw2_log.txt

Framerate is horrible.

For Mac folks (where there is a lot of graphics trouble, I think), I uploaded another build to:

http://www.codeweavers.com/xfer/GW2Test/

(access key : guildwars)

The newest one is just called 'crossover-11.2.0.zip'

Please note that this, as all these builds are, this is highly unsupported: (not even built on our build servers, just on my laptop).

Also, changing to a special 'gw2' build for the last round was, I think, a mistake ease-of-use wise, so this one is just a regular 'CrossOver' build and will look in ~/Library/Application\ Support/CrossOver/Bottles for your GW2 bottle. So ... sorry for that hassle (deploying these 'special' builds to look in different config dirs is something we're experimenting with, not sure how well I like it ...).

At any rate, if there's a Mac user out there with graphics bugs, this build has some fresh hacks.

There is a new registry setting which this build will look for:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/FixedVShaderLimit

So, if you go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/ and make a string value called FixedVShaderLimit, you can play with something that seems to impact the graphics.

In my experience, setting it to 263 gives perfect graphics but bad framerates. (anything above 256 is thought to give bad framerates, but higher numbers are needed to avoid graphics problems. 261 (probably the same framerate) gave a few graphics glitches, but not as many as 256.

Two things would be useful to know:

1.) How bad, in your experience, is the framerate with this value set to 263 or higher? (really, playing with it above whatever setting makes the graphics render well shouldn't impact the framerate. Oh, but don't set it higher than 512 - this build doesn't check for that, but it might cause bad behavior).

2.) How low can you get it and still get reasonable gameplay, given the number of graphics glitches?

The particular issue this addresses is mac-only, so there's no linux equivalent to experiment with.

Cheers,

Josh.

Hey there,

I tried running Guild Wars 2 under Crossover, the modifiedri build, and the newest crossover-11.2.0.zip build. I'm running it on my MacBook Pro. I've been using -useoldlauncher to get into the game (and that works fine). Once in the game, I go to create a character (as I haven't created one yet), and in each build I'm experiencing the same graphical bugs. The character does not display properly while creating a character. It does display properly if the armor is hidden. I'm able to go through the character-bio setup until step 10. When I click to continue from step 9 to 10, the screen freezes (although the music continues to play). Under the CrossOver Task Manager it lists Guild Wars 2 as not responding.

I've changed keys under regedit, but I haven't seen any changes. I'm going to keep trying it and fooling around with it.

Uh, oh. Character creation is something I bet we haven't tested much in a while. I"ll go give it a try.

If you're using 'run command' to run gw2.exe, and you get a consistent character creation crash, a +seh,+tid log might be interesting.

Update: Huh. i don't seem to be able to create a character, either :(

I'm testing the new Mac build you just posted in here and I've set that registry value to 256, unfortunately I still have texture stretching. The texture stretching makes it kind of unplayable since some pretty large bits seem to go across my screen every now and then >.>
The framerate isn't too bad, it's definitely playable but it is shocking compared to how speedy and fluid it was for me in the last beta.
On the plus side, I can move the camera with the mouse (as someone else mentioned you can't move it more than 90 degrees in one go, but no big deal).

Running on a late 2011 MBP 15" with 1680x1050 resolution 4GB RAM.

Philip James wrote:

I'm testing the new Mac build you just posted in here and I've set
that registry value to 256,

If you set the value to 262:

1.) Is the framerate worse / still playable?

2.) do you get any graphics glitches?

Josh DuBois wrote:

Philip James wrote:

I'm testing the new Mac build you just posted in here
and I've set that registry value to 256,

If you set the value to 262:

1.) Is the framerate worse / still playable?

2.) do you get any graphics glitches?

Interestingly enough. There is now only texture stretching on my asura (on the character select screen) All the other races display fine.
There is still some half and half rendering but I have always had that. (Half of the texture renders lighter than the other half, so half the armour is bright and half is normal, but not a big deal).

Texture stretching in game is still pretty bad but other than that the graphics are gorgeous and better than I had them before.
The framerate is really good now, it's only when there is a lot going on on screen (distance stuff) that it goes choppy, but even the its not too bad.

So yeah, absolutely the only annoyance is the texture stretching, the graphics are now pretty great. The blue grass rendering that I had before seems to be gone, so it's just the occasional half bright thing and the stretching thats annoying now.

[quote=486067]> (quote:7)

---

Philip James wrote:

I'm testing the new Mac build you just posted in here
and I've set that registry value to 256,

Texture stretching in game is still pretty bad but other than that
the graphics are gorgeous and better than I had them before.
The framerate is really good now, it's only when there is a lot
going on on screen (distance stuff) that it goes choppy, but even
the its not too bad.

Weird. Setting that to 262 was supposed to make graphics perfect, but the framerate terrible.

You can try bumping it even higher to see whether the stretching goes away. The framerate shouldn't suffer much as it goes higher, after its above 256, I think.

-edit-

I've set the value to 275, this is as high as I can go before the framerate suddenly slows down, and this seems to get rid off all texture stretching and armour issues. As in - Perfect Graphics :)

With enabled logging my framerate is not so fine after all..

http://bpaste.net/show/39890/
modifidrie log with "+win,+tid,+seh" from today's stresstest. No new error accrue.

Ubuntu 12.04 here, the game crashed using the modifiedri bin file, plainri worked fine though , no idea why it happend and camera controll has returned. ,theres another stress test currently going on right now Sunday August 12th 2012 it began at 2pm EST.

Corry Douglas wrote:

Ubuntu 12.04 here, the game crashed using the modifiedri bin file,
plainri worked fine though , no idea why it happend and camera
controll has returned. ,theres another stress test currently going
on right now Sunday August 12th 2012 it began at 2pm EST.

Do you mean Camera Control has returned/is working with the regular crossover build now? Or do you mean with one of these new test builds thats been uploaded in this thread?

Philip James wrote:

Or do you mean with one of these new test builds thats been uploaded
in this thread?

He mean with the plainri-test build.

Another Note:

Bug number 9568 - Area around characters appears to be foggy.

I read somewhere that this bug disappear if you activate GLSL in the Registry will try this next time.

Guild Wars 2 will be conducting a stress test tomorrow Wednesday, August 15 from 12:00 Noon PACIFIC Time to 4:00 PM PACIFIC Time.

I am not sure about the GLSL Stuff. I think that the Registry in Direct3D for GLSL and "enabled" fix the issue of the foggy sphere. But.. could be that in the Tutorial was "no" foggy-sphere after all. Since i got only 2 fps and the Logfile is about more then 3,2 GB i think that is not well to load it up.

But after all, i think thaere is no interesting error message cause enable GLSL seems to fix that bug. Thought in Crossover GLSL is enabled as default as in Wine (since 0.94).

Bad news: The freeze Keyboard-Bug is still there.

To Josh and all the other CodeWeavers staff, I know there are still issues, but I just wanted to thank you on behalf of the entire community for all the hard work you are doing to give us a chance to play this game. We really appreciate it and thank you truly for everything that you are sharing with us. :)

Samuel Cosby wrote:

To Josh and all the other CodeWeavers staff, I know there are still
issues, but I just wanted to thank you on behalf of the entire
community for all the hard work you are doing to give us a chance to
play this game. We really appreciate it and thank you truly for
everything that you are sharing with us. :)

Thanks! Over here, Caron and our graphics devs are really the people to thank :). It looks like there are a lot of challenges with GW2, but we'll keep trying!

Cheers,

Josh.

I am trying to get everything set up for the launch of Guild Wars 2. I download the files you made to try and get running so I can have mouse control, but I ran into a slight issure, I can not get the '-useoldlauncher' command to work, so I can not get the GW2 to update. Any suggestions to get around this?

Erik Rahner wrote:

I am trying to get everything set up for the launch of Guild Wars 2.
I download the files you made to try and get running so I can have
mouse control, but I ran into a slight issure, I can not get the
'-useoldlauncher' command to work, so I can not get the GW2 to
update. Any suggestions to get around this?

Try the command -dx9single, this worked for me. The Update process is working.

its seems thats a week ago a patch caused -useoldlauncher to not work anymore.

Jaison Bednar wrote:

its seems thats a week ago a patch caused -useoldlauncher to not
work anymore.

Yes the Stresstest ath the 20th removed this. But all use the -dx9single. I have no trouble with this. The gamedownload work well with this...