Guild Wars Forum

Hi,

So, I've been trying to get Guild Wars working in any way on Ubuntu 9.04 for probably the past (about) week and a half.

Up to today, I had been attempting to use Wine by itself (stable (1.0.1) and the latest beta (1.1.28)). The farthest I had successfully proceeded through running Guild Wars (let alone playing) was guessing what I had typed into the email and password fields and after logging in and seeing that still nothing was visible, I gave in and purchased the license for CrossOver.

Thus far, I at least now (with "-dx8" and "-windowed" command line options) can see the background render for the login, but I am still unable to see any of the UI, except of course for a blinking cursor where the email needs to be entered.

My system:

Dell Inspiron E1705 running Ubuntu 9.04
Core Duo @ 1.83 GHz
2 GB DDR2 533 RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 (running ATI's prop driver, have also tried with the linux generic driver, no noticeable difference)
(It's a piece of junk, but it's run Guild Wars in the past, on both XP and Vista, with no problems)

I'm getting really tired of trying stuff. I've done a lot of searching, checked many "solutions", nothing seems to change anything. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know, or if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Chris

You could try disabling Pixel Shaders, which I seem to remember helping when I had an ATI.

(Crossover Games -> Configuration -> Manage Bottles -> <yourbottle> -> Configure -> Control Panel -> winecfg -> Graphics -> Allow Pixel Shader)

In general, I never had much luck getting ANYTHING to work with ATI's drivers, and changed to an 8800GT last year - smooth sailing since then.

Thanks, I'll try that. Unfortunately, I can't change graphics cards cause I'm on a laptop. Well, not feasibly, I have in the past, but it cost an arm and a leg and I only did it because my previous card had failed and Dell refused to do anything about it.

If that doesn't do it, try changing the Vertex shader support in the same menu from Hardware to None. Back when I had ATI those two options were the main causes of "faults".

Well, to update, I can now see the UI, however, the frame rate is unbearably poor and unfortunately unplayable. I am unsure exactly what changes caused this, although I'm fairly certain using the X.Org radeonhd driver helped, but ultimately the performance is still terrible.
I'm assuming that that has to do with configuration of the driver, as I've noticed decreased graphics performance in other aspects of the system.
I will update this with more information as possible.

Ok, new information:

So, I got the framerate reasonable for a while, though I was forced to use -dx8, as with -dx9 I could not see UI or any 3D renders (trees, fire posts, etc on the menu screen) were displayed momentarily but then disappeared, replaced by a checkered pattern as if the textures couldn't be read.

Today, I updated CG to 8.0.0, in hopes that I might be able to use -dx9. However, whenever I try to use dx9, Guild Wars opens, but nothing is displayed, and I am unable to exit, and am forced to hard shut down my system. I can run Guild Wars still in dx8 and exit, however, it now suffers the problem that dx9 had before, though now the 3D renders are visible.

I tried playing with registry settings (I'd set a bunch before, multisampling [enabled], UseGLSL [enabled], DirectDrawRenderer [opengl], OffscreenRenderingMode [pbuffer], RenderTargetLockMode [textex], VideoMemorySize [128], VideoPciDeviceID [0xZZZZ], VideoPciVendorID [0xYYYY] *I can't remember what the values were, got them from lspci), to no avail. I also messed with winecfg for the bottle, to see if changing the shader options (pixel shaders, vertex shaders) would help at all, though it didn't.

If there's any more information I'm missing, let me know.

Have you got the newest driver from ATI that supports your card? The ATI website is denying the existence of any drivers for the X1400, which is strange.

When I had my X1950Pro, I had similar issues with hair not being rendered and certain structures not being there, and that was a driver issue.

As you're running Ubuntu, you can add the XSwat PPAs and it'll upgrade your FGLRX to the latest version. I use it to update my nvidia drivers without faffing about, and got a nice performance boost from it at least.

The added bonus of doing it through a PPA is it if DOES mess up, you can change back relatively easily.

Hmm, I'll try that. Thanks for the tip!

So, regarding the fglrx drivers, it seems they are still unusable (in my case). Every time I've tried to use them (including this release), as soon as I reboot, any and all graphics are incorrectly rendered (including the ubuntu login screen), and I have to remove them via the shell prompt in recovery mode. sigh

That's mighty wierd - the only issue I ever had with 2d when running FGLRX was it being a little slow, and the mouse pointer acting a bit funny sometimes. It might be worth trying to debug the issue with the FGLRX.

Of course, it might just be your graphics chip + FGLRX = a mess, as ATI's site doesn't mention it AT ALL.

Yeah, to be honest, I'm not going to worry about it. I do know the radeonhd driver mentions support for the Mobility X1400, but I've spent too much time already trying to get this working, and in the end I don't really have the time any more to play Guild Wars anyway. For that matter, if I really wanted to, I could always just get on my desktop (Q6600 @ 2.40 GHz, 8GB DDR2 1066, 2x GTX 260 (SLI); ie, more than enough for most games, let alone GW).

In any case, thanks for all the help. This certainly has helped me with learning linux in a lot of ways.

No problem, it's just a shame we couldn't coax it in to working a bit better.