Guild Wars Forum

I came across a post in the Advocates-only forums by Matthew Brown that indicated that Guild Wars was running better with recent nightly builds. He had recommended build 070713, but I figured I'd try the most recent so I downloaded and ran build 070724.

He's right! The Catacombs area which gave me so many problems before works much better now. Using the command line options recommended on the Tips & Tricks page (-dx8 -windowed -noshaders -dsound) I was able to make it half way through the Catacombs without a freeze. Previously the game would freeze immediately upon entering the catacombs. There's an area in the Catacombs with a waterfall where you first encounter spiders. It seemed like the act of looking in the direction of the waterfall precipitated the freeze. I tried reconnecting, but with the "-noshaders" option this time, and was able to get all the way down to Oberan the Reviled without incident.

The other surprising improvement: I've got battle sounds! I never heard those before.

For those who have access to nightly builds, you may want to give a recent build a try. For those who don't, it looks like you've got something to look forward too in the next release.

Be careful with your expectations, please. 😊

Note that nightly builds may contain stuff which will not be in our next release. If they don't make it into our upcoming 6.2 release, they should be in the following major release.

The fixes for Mac sound which I've given folks a chance to test will be included in our next release. I have no knowledge if this is so, but it may be that those fixes were what improved the behavior of Guild Wars. Or, it may be something completely different. 😉

Hmm, I could have sworn that I posted the instructions to get that test audio driver to these Guild Wars forums, but I don't find it. If you want to test the new audio driver, here are the instructions to get them:

) Go to http://dl.codeweavers.com
) Enter access key: coreaudio_test
) Download winecoreaudio.tgz
) If your browser doesn't expand the archive automatically, double-click it to expand it
) Control-click (or right-click) on CrossOver.app and select Show Package Contents
) In the new window, navigate to Contents > SharedSupport > CrossOver > lib > wine
) Rename the file winecoreaudio.drv.so to something else (like "winecoreaudio.drv.so.backup")
) Move the new winecoreaudio.drv.so from the archive that you downloaded into the "wine" folder

Now see if 6.1 plus these audio fixes are enough to get Guild Wars to work as well as it does with the nightly builds. Let me know what you find.

NOTE: this is test software. It may cause problems -- anything from sound in other programs failing to the inability to launch any Windows programs at all. Only try this if you're comfortable working with untested software. If you need to revert, just trash the new winecoreaudio.drv.so and restore the name of the previous one.

Cheers,
Ken

Using Crossover 6.1 and the above sound driver test, I'm still getting lockups on loading zones, requiring killing GW. I've experienced this in loading Ascalon City and Old Ascalon, as well as in the middle of Old Ascalon. I still don't have combat sounds. Using the same command line parameters to GW as the first poster in this thread.
Sadly, I can't compare to the nightly build, as I don't have access to that.

Ken Thomases wrote:

Note that nightly builds may contain stuff which will not be in our
next release. If they don't make it into our upcoming 6.2 release,
they should be in the following major release.

I see what you mean. I decided to try DL'ing a newer build (070809) and found that I no longer had battle sounds. I wonder if the audio fixes that Ken mentioned have been removed for the 6.2 release?

At least for now I can stick with the 070724 release which works better for me.

The audio fixes I've mentioned and made available for testing are still in the nightly builds and will be in 6.2. However, there have been other changes made, too. We recently switched our nightly builds from being based off of our unstable tip to being based off of our stable branch (which is what 6.2 will be based on). So, a bunch of stuff that's only on the tip is now not included in the nightly builds.

Is the 070724 build now on the stable branch or is that still from unstable? and is whatever is causing GW to freeze going to be in 6.2 because i tested the beta for 6.2 and still had pretty consistent freezing.