Guild Wars Forum

I'm on the trial version of Crossover games. My macbook pro is fully up to date, and has the GeForce 8600M GT graphics card. SO, everything should work fine, and everything did up until i tried to load my new character into the first outpost (Ascalon City). It takes about an hour to an hour and a half to load. I installed it via CD, and everything went smoothly. So I cant figure out what the problem is and why it takes so long to load. I tried quitting all other applications, but that did not affect the loading speed. help please? I'll really appreciate anything you guys can offer.

Is this reproducible? If you go back to the same place, does the same problem occur? How is the in-game rendering speed?

My quick guess is that the game files were updated, so you had to re-download lots of files from the internet, even though you installed from the cd earlier. In this case it should be a one-time occurance.

At the moment, I'd offer the following advice.

Try installing the game from CrossOver's built-in installer; in other words, download the game client, don't use the CD. Once you've downloaded the game client and it's installed properly, try launching the game with the -image modifier; doing this will download all the latest game files from the server.

My reasoning for this is that installing from the CD is not officially supported, where downloading the client is; as for using the -image modifier, it's just a good way to ensure that your gaming isn't interrupted by any massive downloads.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

awesome man thanks, i sure hope youre right. I'm not sure if its reproducible, as I'm still waiting for it to load for the first time. But your explanation is very possible since the last time I played was about a year ago. haha thanks again, i'll let you know if it happens again after this first load.

thank you very much, but the problem has been resolved. the previous poster was right, it was a one time thing. I simply overreacted in my impatience. thanks again.

Glad you've got it up and running. I personally would still recommend running the game with the -image switch and leaving it overnight; this will make sure that you don't ever have to sit through a long download time like that again. The way that the game works, whenever you enter a significantly different area, it downloads a somewhat massive file. The -image command simply grabs them all.

Either way, glad it's working for you!

Dain Schroeder wrote:

Glad you've got it up and running. I personally would still
recommend running the game with the -image switch and leaving it
overnight; this will make sure that you don't ever have to sit
through a long download time like that again. The way that the game
works, whenever you enter a significantly different area, it
downloads a somewhat massive file. The -image command simply grabs
them all.

Either way, glad it's working for you!

i'm having the same problem...when i try to load a new area, the download is extremely slow. i don't want to have to go through each area and have it take over an hour each time. i'm not computer savvy at all.... can you please explain that -image switch?

Go into the Crossover menu and pick "Run a Windows command". Hit the browse button, navigate to gw.exe and select it. In the command box it'll fill in something like ".../drive_c/Program Files/Guild Wars/Gw.exe". At the end of the line, outside the quotes, add a space and -image

What this does is force the updater to download everything there is, instead of just the bare minimum you need to get in the game and making you download additional pieces as you enter zones. It takes awhile, so start it running just before you go to bed or work/school/whatever. Sometime when you won't be wanting to play for the next few hours.

When it's done it'll close automatically, and you can run GW as normal.