Guild Wars Forum

So, I'm getting serious about getting Guild Wars running better. It is a real help that Guild Wars runs in some way since quite some time, and that you - our users - have some experience with it. I'd like to collect all known issues, with possible workarounds. I am mainly focused on the graphics side for now, but other issues are welcome too.

What I have so far:

-> Shader problems on macos. I have seen some here, they shouldn't be too hard to fix.

-> DirectX9 rendering issues on Linux, complete failure on MacOS. I can't promise to get it working on the mac, the Linux issues should be fixable.

-> Stability issues

-> (from the wine bugtracker) : Problems on the Linux ATI driver

Any other issues? How is

-> a number of other rendering issues. A list of them would be nice

-> no hardware cursor. This is fixed in the current development code, and works nice on Linux, but negatively affects the cursor on macos.

Any other open issues? How is your experience with the performance of the game? Does it work on all sorts of macs? Does it work on Intel cards(Linux as well as Mac)?

I can't get Guild Wars to run on my Macbook Pro. It's a 2.2 ghz with an Nvidia 8600M 128M.
I can get it to install, I can create a character (dx9 works fine during character creation), and launch the game. As soon as it gets to 100% on the loading screen, it hangs and I have to force quit the bottle. Any ideas?

It is propably a driver bug, but that says that I have no idea really. The Nvidia 8000 drivers seem to be terribly buggy, at least on Tiger. I have spend the weeks before the 6.2 release debugging them, and now I've spent a week debugging more driver issues, and I think I'll spend the next weeks with driver debugging too.

i know only three isssue on osx 10.4.9

first is the missing courser after loading a map. ->fix: mover over an object with hover efect.
second: only a part of the courser is displayed. looks like the sceleton of the courser. (
third: the game randomly freezes.

ps: there is one more bug if you dont use dx8 and noshaders option. ( dont remeber on witch one it depens)
-> some visually missing object like stairs.

pps: for better answeres i need your help.
what kind of LOG files are important to you? when starting the game with the command mode(?) i can choose to log different options.
if u say to me witch one i shall log i can provide u some log files. maybe that helps against the freezing. because if this bug is removed every thing else is unimportant.

Log files don't help much, they usually contain way too much information which is hard to filter.

What is helpful though are steps to reproduce the issue, together with a description what happens and what should happen. E.g. screenshots from Crossover and Windows of the same place(mail them to stefan@codeweavers.com). Ideally, describe the steps to reproduce from a new character, since it is bad if I have to play for weeks to reproduce an issue.

I have bad news regarding Directx9 on macs. I've been trying to get something useful out of Apple's GLSL implementation, but after hitting a number of low level killer bugs without workarounds I gave up on that. I didn't try Leopard yet, but we definitely won't have dx9 support for Tiger. On Linux things look better though, at least on Nvidia cards.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

So, I'm getting serious about getting Guild Wars running better. It
is a real help that Guild Wars runs in some way since quite some
time, and that you - our users - have some experience with it. I'd
like to collect all known issues, with possible workarounds. I am
mainly focused on the graphics side for now, but other issues are
welcome too.

Hi Stefan. Great to hear that you're going to be concentrating more on Guild Wars. I've been impressed with your work on CrossOver/Wine, and I'm sure with someone of your talent looking into these issues Guild Wars will absolutely rock on CrossOver 7! If you ever need any testing done feel free to contact me through my advocate e-mail address. I have a one year old iMac with a ATI Radeon X1600 GC, 1 GB RAM, OS X 10.4. I also expect to be upgrading my PPC-based PowerBook to a new Macbook Pro in the next few months, which should give me another machine capable of running CrossOver Mac.

CrossOver 6.2 was definitely an improvement for me over 6.1, but there are still some issues. I currently have two bottles set up with Guild Wars, one Win98 bottle and one WinXP. When I run in the XP bottle I have to use the parameters "-dx8 -windowed -noshaders" to run properly. Leaving off "-noshaders" seems to improve stability at the cost of graphical glitches as I documented on the "Tips & Tricks" page. The game will not run in the XP bottle without the "-dx8" parameter. As of 6.2, though, I've found that I can run Guild Wars in the Win98 bottle with no parameters at all (hooray!). I don't have DX9 installed in that bottle currently, so I'm assuming it automatically runs with DX8.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

What I have so far:

-> Shader problems on macos. I have seen some here, they shouldn't
be too hard to fix.

-> DirectX9 rendering issues on Linux, complete failure on MacOS. I
can't promise to get it working on the mac, the Linux issues should
be fixable.

Re: shaders. As mentioned above, use of shaders in the WinXP bottle results in some graphical elements not being rendered (stairs, doors, character's heads/hair). I'd actually been thinking about installing DX9 into my Win98 bottle and giving it a go. Will report back once I've had a chance to do so.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

-> Stability issues

Stability improved between 6.1 and 6.2 (hence my rating upgrade from Bronze to Silver). In the original Guild Wars Prophecies game areas I rarely experience game freezes now. I recently installed the new Eye of the North expansion, and freezes in those game areas are much more common. My theory is that the game developers have assumed that hardware technology has improved, and therefore made these areas more graphically complex which is overwhelming CrossOver. Again, if you need any testing done I know of one area in particular that seems to cause a freeze consistently.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

-> (from the wine bugtracker) : Problems on the Linux ATI driver

Any other issues? How is

-> a number of other rendering issues. A list of them would be nice

-> no hardware cursor. This is fixed in the current development
code, and works nice on Linux, but negatively affects the cursor on
macos.

Any other open issues? How is your experience with the performance
of the game? Does it work on all sorts of macs? Does it work on
Intel cards(Linux as well as Mac)?

Getting the cursor problems fixed on MacOS would be nice. It gets kinda annoying sometimes trying to move an invisible cursor over game objects to force a redraw.

Performance is generally pretty good, but I can always tell when I'm entering an town/outpost area that contains a lot of human players as it takes a fair bit longer for the game to finish rendering the area.

Lately I've been playing the game using recent dev builds (currently I'm using the 20071029 build). The bug that I reported in the Advacates Forum whereby Mac dev builds weren't working after the 6.2 release seems to have been fixed. Stability "feels" about the same as it did with 6.2. What I have noticed, though, is that when I experience a freeze and select "Quit Bottle" to reset it seems to take a LOT longer to shut down the bottle.

Sorry for the long post. Hope some of this helps.

Steve, thank you for your very helpful post!

Are there any graphical differences between "-dx8" and "-dx8 -noshaders"? I can confirm that -noshaders is noticeably faster, and shaders enabled have some visual glitches on MacOS(working fine on the Linux nvidia driver). I am thinking about enabling GLSL for this game on Macs. So far GLSL is faster than the standard ARB shaders in some places, but they have some additional rendering problems and fall back to software very often.

Is there any good in getting shaders working well combined with -dx8? Or is it wasted effort anyway?

I'm a player of GW and the biggest problem is the constant freezing.

As a pvp player constantly zoning into PVP games, whether RA or GvG or whatever it may be, its frustrating to have to reload every 10 minutes.

Please dedicate some time and efforts into fixing this problem, as in the grand scheme of things, I'd imagine this is the biggest problem: playing the game.

thanks!

Andrew

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Are there any graphical differences between "-dx8" and "-dx8
-noshaders"?

Leaving off "-noshaders" results in some graphics not being rendered (characters are headless or have no hair, stairs/doors/bridges are missing), but seems more stable in that the game seems to freeze less.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Is there any good in getting shaders working well combined with
-dx8? Or is it wasted effort anyway?

My response would be, it depends on how well it works with DX9. 😉

Seriously, though, I tried running tonight with just "-dx9" in my WinXP bottle (nightly build 20071029). It seemed to run pretty well, in fact performance seemed better than with "-dx8". Played for about an hour with no freezeups. You can bet I'll be testing that further in the coming days.

Steve Jakob wrote:

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Are there any graphical differences between "-dx8" and
"-dx8 -noshaders"?

Leaving off "-noshaders" results in some graphics not being rendered
(characters are headless or have no hair, stairs/doors/bridges are
missing), but seems more stable in that the game seems to freeze
less.

Sorry, I wasn't clear on this: Are there any differences on Windows? Is there any difference in how it is supposed to look? So if I fix all issues with out -noshaders, does that change anything?

Steve Jakob wrote:

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Is there any good in getting shaders working well combined
with -dx8? Or is it wasted effort anyway?

My response would be, it depends on how well it works with DX9.
😉

Seriously, though, I tried running tonight with just "-dx9" in my
WinXP bottle (nightly build 20071029). It seemed to run pretty well,
in fact performance seemed better than with "-dx8". Played for about
an hour with no freezeups. You can bet I'll be testing that further
in the coming days.

Actually I just wanted to say that -dx9 is not going to happen on MacOS. I tried it in GW, and I tried GLSL in Half Life 2, and I stumbled upon circa 10 major low level bugs which I just cannot workaround without modifying Guild Wars itself.

Looking at -dx9 actually it seems more like it is an advanced version of -dx8, so it might work without GLSL. There are no 2.0 and 3.0 shaders, only 1.x ones which existed in Direct3D 8 already and are support by opengl assembler shaders. The only problem I currently see are non power of two textures, and they only affect ATI radeon X1... cards and Intel cards. Fixing that issue on ATI won't be easy though.

AndrewC wrote:

I'm a player of GW and the biggest problem is the constant freezing.

Do you know about any action / situation which is very prone to crashes? I am pretty new to guild wars, and so far I've stayed mainly in the main menu to debug shaders there. In game I haven't got beyond the primary spawn point. Instructions how to reproduce the problems with a newly created character would really help me.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Sorry, I wasn't clear on this: Are there any differences on Windows?
Is there any difference in how it is supposed to look? So if I fix
all issues with out -noshaders, does that change anything?

Your assumption that I have Windows is flawed. 😉
I'm afraid I can't help you there.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Actually I just wanted to say that -dx9 is not going to happen on
MacOS. I tried it in GW, and I tried GLSL in Half Life 2, and I
stumbled upon circa 10 major low level bugs which I just cannot
workaround without modifying Guild Wars itself.

Well that sux. Am I to infer from this that CrossOver will not be a viable method of playing Windows games on Mac in the future?

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Looking at -dx9 actually it seems more like it is an advanced
version of -dx8, so it might work without GLSL. There are no 2.0 and
3.0 shaders, only 1.x ones which existed in Direct3D 8 already and
are support by opengl assembler shaders. The only problem I
currently see are non power of two textures, and they only affect
ATI radeon X1... cards and Intel cards. Fixing that issue on ATI
won't be easy though.

My card is an ATI Radeon X1600, IIRC. I'd be happy to test out any changes you make but, as mentioned previously, I don't have Windows so can't do a direct comparison at this time. That may change once I upgrade my laptop, as I'm going to need a copy of XP to access a couple of my clients' networks, but that may be a few months away.

Steve Jakob wrote:

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Actually I just wanted to say that -dx9 is not going to
happen on MacOS. I tried it in GW, and I tried GLSL in Half Life
2,
and I stumbled upon circa 10 major low level bugs which I just
cannot workaround without modifying Guild Wars itself.

Well that sux. Am I to infer from this that CrossOver will not be a
viable method of playing Windows games on Mac in the future?

No, there is no architectural problem. Apple just has to fix the bugs in their OpenGL implementation. Leopard seems to be a big step forward in that direction, and the worst problems seem to affect only ATI cards.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

No, there is no architectural problem. Apple just has to fix the
bugs in their OpenGL implementation. Leopard seems to be a big step
forward in that direction, and the worst problems seem to affect
only ATI cards.

Thanks for the clarification. So I guess I should be in better shape if I were to get one of the new Macbook Pro's with the Nvidia cards. Something to look forward to I suppose.

Hi Stefan

As I can best determine, this freezing is caused by one of two things:

some specific pvp maps cause the game to freeze OR there's a problem with zone loading in general which causes the game to freeze some of the times, but not always.

I am unable to determine which is the case, because the game freezes at 100% loading, before I can see a map or anything.

With regards to reproducing this situation in game, I'd recommend spending 30 minutes or so PVPing in the Random Arenas. Every so often as you try to get into a game you'll freeze up at 100% loading, other times randomly during the game, but this is far less frequent.

Hope I've been helpful

• Difference between dx8 and dx9 ? ill try to figure out some as windows is my main operation system. (i apologize) more next week.

-playing without -noshaders result in a thousands of smal err. (as metioned in the thread some loggings). i gues that is the main performance disadantage. (but i ant say for sure)

fixme:d3d_draw:drawStridedFast >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> GL_INVALID_OPERATION (0x502) from glDrawElements @ drawprim.c / 279 

The main issue for me right now is a ghostly cursor. When it's not entirely invisible it's mostly alpha-channel with a few edges. Everything else seems to be fine after about an hour of RA testing. But not seeing the cursor is pretty hard on a Monk.

having the mouse fixed. the last problem is the real fullscreen mode. and performance going with it.

FYI, the ghostly mouse seems to be fixed with wine 0.9.50, or at least, one user reports so on winehq.org.

It a shame Apple's OpenGL X11 is still broken on Leopard. Makes the problem solving harder than it should have been, I suppose.

Hey Stefan,
i just loaded the 6.2 trialversion to see if i can get guild wars run on my new macbook. it has all system requirements and i followed your instructions, but directx doesn t really seem to work.
can you help me? im affraid to throw 40$ out of the window if really can t work on my macbook.
best regards

Valentin, I've put some work into Guild Wars for the upcoming CrossOver 7.0, the game will work better there. For 6.2 I recommend you to look around in the forum for problem descriptions and workarounds, but Guild Wars doesn't run too well there. We do not have any official release date for 7.0 yet, we've become a bit ambitious regarding new features so we missed our originally intended release date.

Hello there, as I am a one of long time tests I will state that the Cross Over starting up 6.2.x version meets all requirement to run Guild Wars at least initially. It is in fact. So no one has blame out the great work of programmer's stuff also accusing them as for wasting money at all. Therefore there are a bunch of rly annoying bugs still retains:
Mac OS X 10.4.11 - and later I believe

• Still no possibilities to enter missions weren't implemented (however it has been tested by both different configurations: iMac Core 2 duo 2 Ghz single ATI X1600 128 Megs and Mac Pro 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 dual series processor with ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 Megs).
• Lowest production compared to windows based machines that measures in FPS.
• Some graphics flaws like loosing possibility to get a picture with 'post processing effects' switches on.

Kindest regards

Hi.

I'm now running 6.2 and have moved over to Leopard.

I can finally get the game menu to come up and the character selection screen, something that wasn't working for me with the previous version of Crossover I was running (6.0, I think).

I don't have access to the nightly builds, but I have requested to be an advocate, so hopefully that will come soon.

My system is an odd one: 2.42 Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, ATI X1900 with 512MB running OS 10.5.1

I can finally get into the game itself, but playing PVE, I can't seem to start any missions. When I try, it loads up to 97-99% and then then freezes. I have to go into the bottle and quit it there. I'm running all the recommended switches, but I haven't tried installing DX9, 'cause frankly I didn't really understand the instructions.

I'd like to help get this working, so if there's anything I can do, please let me know. From what I'm reading in this thread, it looks like I'll be running an XP install and rebooting when I want to play GuildWars, at least until you guys release the new version.

It's my hope that I can be completely Windows free. :)

Hi Ford,

Have a look in the Tips & Tricks section for Guild Wars, I wrote a little how to for dealing with DX9 there.

You will probably find that you can't run DX9, but at least you will know how to do it, & it's not hard.

You do not have to install any DX 8 or 9, as they are already built into CrossOver, you just turn it them on with the appropriate command line switch, either -dx8 or -dx9.

Good luck

I have been running Guild Wars on my Macbook Pro 17" core 2 duo 2.33 2gig of ram ATI x1600 and what I have noticed so far is that there are random freeze-ups that occur randomly when zoning and always at 100%. As far as the mouse is concerned if you enter the map and exit it redraws the cursor, double tapping "m" will redraw the screen without opening the map and the cursor will become visible. The biggest problems I encounter while playing are the freeze-ups and lack of battle sounds.