Guild Wars Forum

It became apparent to me (after several 8hour+ sessions) that prolonged usage of Guild Wars seems to make the Cursor Disappear.
The rendered in-game cursor vanishes. And while the Mac OS Cursor is still available outside the rendered GW Display (Menus, Other applications etc), it is totally invisible within the game.

You can still USE the pointer of course. If you manage to hover over the right spot, you can still click and activate things.

This is far from a critical issue, the latest update to CXG kicked ass. Everything is smooth, and responding as expected. I am curious if there's anything I could do as a user to prevent/solve this without closing Crossover, and restarting it. (Though that works, it's tedious)

Thanks for any insight.

This is a known problem, testers have reported it as early as during the CrossOver Games 7.0 beta test. Unfortunately, this problem is rather rare. I have seen it only once since I worked on Guild Wars. This makes it very hard for me to debug this, because it is hard to fix a problem I can't reproduce.

If you have any suspicion of what could cause this issue(e.g. handling specific objects, some actions, whatever), clues would be highly welcome!

I'll keep a vigilante eye out for symptoms. It's not easily recreatable, but occasionally I hit an Especially long run, and it'll happen.
If I find anything, I'll repost.

Thanks for the info.

I have found this problem often.

Sometimes 4 times in one day.

It is totally annoying, whether solo running or playing in a team, you have to leave the team & restart GW, everyone is let down, some people won't play with you anymore because they consider you unreliable.

If this problem is ever fixed (& somehow I doubt it ever will be) I would rate GW gold, as it is I rate it silver, but at times I have been extremely disappointed after this game breaker hits & it wouldn't get anywhere near a silver rating.

I can find no pattern in this failure, it has happened when I have not been playing for long, it has sometimes taken weeks to happen again, & then I will have a bad week where it happens at least once a day for days in a row.

I don't have anything running in the background I can see no connections in anyway shape or form that would give any clues as to why the mouse cursor disappears in GW.

Lets hope this problem doesn't exist in GW-2 eh!? 😉

A user reports that moving items back and forth from inventory to storage for about 5 minutes is a surefire way to cause the cursor to disappear. The cursor also disappears on the user after several hours of play, but the back-and-forth inventory moving is a good trigger for testing purposes.

Ooh! This has happened to me too! As mentioned, I think it has always happened while playing around in the inventory window.

I can confirm the problem. After a few hours of playing the cursor disappears. This is quite annoying :(

If you are able to reproduce this problem reliably, please submit a support ticket or send an email to info@codeweavers.com. If you can get a CrossOver logfile of the program with +seh specified, that would be helpful.

I have done some debugging of this issue. It's a combination of bugs: Guild Wars is doing something weird (destroying the active cursor icon) and CrossOver/Wine doesn't handle it properly.

I don't have a fix and I can't even offer a clean workaround that avoids the problem.

However, I can say that the problem is one which "accumulates". Effectively, every time Guild Wars changes the cursor, it uses up a limited resource. Eventually, that resource is exhausted and Guild Wars can't create any more cursors. So, it's not just random. I realize that restarting Guild Wars is a pain, but if you can do it at convenient opportunities on regular basis, you can avoid the cursor disappearing on you at inconvenient moments.

Interesting feature I found tonight:

Had my cursor vanish during Nolani Academy mission (ack!), while in windowed mode. Normally, when I move the system cursor into the GW window it vanishes (and should be replaced by the custom GW cursor, but wasn't). However, I have an expanding dock, that expands over the bottom edge of the GW window. If I moved the cursor into the dock, and then dragged it off the top of the dock directly into the GW window I'd retain the system cursor even within the GW window. I could then use that cursor until I moved it out of the window. I also seemed to lose the cursor if I hit 'return' to type in the chat box; it might be text input box handling auto-hiding it?

Curiously, I've never got a double-cursor from going into and out of the dock / GW. So it's something relevant to the "losing the cursor" bug that enables this to work.

Side comment: the system cursor movement felt slightly "uneven" compared to the GW cursor, but that might have just been perceptual bias / expectations.

TEMPORARY WORKAROUND: I've found that if I trigger Exposé, then dismiss it by clicking in the game window, I can get a cursor back. It's not the Guild Wars game cursor, but it at least allows me to see what I'm clicking on. I then restart Crossover at my earliest opportunity.

Ken Thomases wrote:

However, I can say that the problem is one which "accumulates".
Effectively, every time Guild Wars changes the cursor, it uses up a
limited resource. Eventually, that resource is exhausted and Guild
Wars can't create any more cursors. So, it's not just random. I
realize that restarting Guild Wars is a pain, but if you can do it
at convenient opportunities on regular basis, you can avoid the
cursor disappearing on you at inconvenient moments.

That makes sense based on what I've seen. The problem usually shows up for me after 3-4 hours play, and usually when the cursor gets moved outside the game window (I play in windowed mode, not full screen). If I use the temporary workaround I described above, the problem recurs consistently when I move the cursor out of the game window and back in. Obviously the game is trying to recreate the cursor image, and failing.

It is such a strange problem:

I have had it happen to me at worst inside of the first hour of play, & I've not been in & out of storage; it has happened at least 4 times (I'm being conservative here) in one 6 hour session (I was not happy that day :)); I have gone for 3 weeks of long sessions & not had the problem!?

I believe that there is at least one unknown variable involved in this problem (I'm renowned for stating the obvious ;) as different people have different experiences.

By the way, I always play in full screen mode.

With this particular bug solved, I would consider GW via CX perfect & would give it a gold score. The occasional (& to me at least) very minor graphics issues are not worth mentioning, apart from this mouse bug, GW plays superbly & looks incredibly good.

Thanks once again to all concerned, you really did pull a rabbit out of the hat for so many of us alternate (OSX & Linux) GW players. :D

I'd imagine that anything that changes the cursor would contribute to the accumulation, whether it be messing with inventory/storage (the cursor changes to a hand, or the the special pointers when ID'ing/salvaging), hovering over friendlies/interactive objects (it gets a green glow around it), or hovering unfriendlies (red glow).

My personal recommendation is to just use the mouse as little as possible (use WASD to move, C and Tab for targetting enemies in explorables and party members in town, get close and hit V+space to talk to merchants, ;+space to pick up items, etc), and, as much as possible, save your inventory management for all at once when either it's not too much bother to restart, or when you're going to log off after anyway.

I play very much the way you speak of above, not entirely, but certainly very much that way.

It is still a pain in the RRR's. I have been playing today, in a team situation, I'd not been playing for two hours, & I had to finish a hard mode mission without a mouse pointer, as best I could, in a team.

This IS, the problem that GW on non-native platforms still has, played via CX anyway, I can't speak about Cedega these days, as I don't go near it.

handy wrote:

It is still a pain in the RRR's. I have been playing today, in a
team situation, I'd not been playing for two hours, & I had to
finish a hard mode mission without a mouse pointer, as best I could,
in a team.
If/when it happens again, both Steve and I above have workarounds in Windowed mode; you might try triggering expose as per Steve's hint, or switching to Windowed mode (if you can find the buttons to press with an invisible mouse).

The important thing is that if you got the system cursor showing you must avoid moving it outside the GW window. As soon as it crosses out and back in, you'll lose it again until you re-apply a trick.

Believe me, I understand your pain. I play quite a lot myself, only recently finished up my HM missions and vanquishing, and I come across this bug often. In fact, I'm the user Jack mentioned above who noticed that moving inventory stuff around is a quick and easy way to reproduce the bug for testing purposes. Most of the time, I either use henches and heroes, or play with guildmates/allies who don't mind waiting a minute while I kill GW.exe from the System Monitor and reconnect to get my cursor back, but that's not always an option due to time constraints and the heat of battle and such... So yeah, I know. Just sharing the best ways I know to minimize the problem.

Regarding the workarounds mentioned, I take it you guys are Mac users? Linux here. Not so much with the dock or exposé.

Pat wrote:

Regarding the workarounds mentioned, I take it you guys are Mac
users? Linux here. Not so much with the dock or exposé.

Yes, the workaround I described was for the Mac environment.

I would think that you could accomplish the same thing in windowed mode on Linux by forcing a pointer change. For example, when I move the pointer over the K Menu item in the KDE panel, the cursor changes from an arrow pointer to a hand with pointing finger. You might try moving the cursor out of the game window to the K Menu icon (assuming you're using KDE as your window manager), then back into the game. I haven't got Crossover set up on any of my Linux systems, so I can't say for sure whether this will work.

I occasionally notice the opposite problem on startup - the default system cursor is retained for a while until I hover over a character on the character select screen.

I asked Joe Kimmes (Guild Wars Live Team coder) about this over on the wiki. He confirms "that the cursor is indeed recreating itself (allocating/deallocating memory) when it changes icons". While he admits to not having much experience with this section of the code, he does seem willing to give it some attention. Perhaps the Codeweavers guys could formulate a question on what you would need to know to get this finally fixed? Or is this something you can't do much about even with perfect information?

Pat wrote:

I asked Joe Kimmes (Guild Wars Live Team coder) about this over on
[link=http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User_talk:Joe_Kimmes#Cursor]the
wiki[/link]. He confirms "that the cursor is indeed recreating
itself (allocating/deallocating memory) when it changes icons".
While he admits to not having much experience with this section of
the code, he does seem willing to give it some attention. Perhaps
the Codeweavers guys could formulate a question on what you would
need to know to get this finally fixed? Or is this something you
can't do much about even with perfect information?

Hey, thanks for the pursuing this with them. 😊

The problem for us is not that they keep recreating their cursors. The problem is that they destroy the current cursor. Their code is calling DestroyCursor, DestroyIcon, or DestroyIcon32 on the cursor which is currently active. Windows handles this fine, but CrossOver/Wine does not. That's our bug, and we'll eventually solve it, but it's surprisingly complicated, so the solution is not coming soon. If they're willing to change their code to first set a different cursor before destroying the old one, that would be great!

Good morning,

i use the iMac 24" with 3,06 GHz, 4GB RAM and ATI Radeon HD 4850.

Today play 3 hours GuildWars an then disappear the cursor.

The workarround is for me not usable because i cant play without Mouse.

You have a solution for this problem?

Than please send me a mail.

Very thanks!

;O)

This is very odd, but I have the same problem; just not on all of my systems. On my 24" iMac, the cursor eventually disappears, and on my 17" iMac, the cursor eventually disappears. However, on my 17" MacBook Pro, the cursor has never disappeared once, and I've played for many hours to test this.

This problem has always existed with Guild Wars & the Crossover's.

Some people have been able to get the mouse back if they play in windowed mode & do a trick or two, as mentioned in previous posts in this thread.

I just close the game by putting the invisible mouse in the top right corner & closing the game, then log back in again.

It can take weeks for this problem to occur, then at other times it may happen 4 or more times in the same long session of playing.

It is the only reason I won't give GW a gold rating.

I doubt that this problem will ever be fixed.

I have been playing all night with 8.0 without a single restart of my client, did a dungeon, vanquished a zone, did a lot of major inventory rearranging, even purposely tried to get it to disappear. My cursor's still there.

Can it be that this is actually finally fixed?

Well, we put in a change which we hoped would fix this issue, but the only real proof is real-world testing. So, it's good to hear that you're having good results!

Thus far, I can also confirm that this issue seems corrected. I'm just coming out of an all-night LAN party with some Guild Wars players, and on all 3 of my Macs the issue never occurred. Awesome work, CodeWeavers. :)

This problem still exists, I've just experienced it on crossover games 8.1.3 on Snow Leopard. Mouse cursor disappears after only 20 minutes of play. Didn't manage to get it back using any of the listed tricks. Earlier today I played for 3 hours without any problems.

I've been vanquishing for hours now with 8.1.3 (Ubuntu 9.10), and my cursor's been fine. Also did about 15 minutes of inventory-shuffling to be sure. Not sure why you lost your cursor, but I can't reproduce it.

Have had this same problem, but only when playing in windowed mode. Its difficult to tell when it exactly happens, but it's almost always during a mission when I'm moving the mouse quickly back and forth for some reason. The Expose workaround does the trick, as does restarting GW.

I've gotten the cursor problem maybe three or four times. Otherwise the game has worked perfectly, gold all the way.

8.1.3, OS X 10.5.8

Hi all,

I was actually surprised to find a post about this issue :)

I use a MacBook Pro 15'' with 4Go memory, same problem again and again. I play many hours a day and here are my observations:

It mostly happens when I play PvE (never happened to me in PvP 'Random Arena' which I play a lot), and mostly at busy hours when playing with a team of 6 or more people.

Once I could get the cursor back by bringing it very slowly from the lower edge of the window (I don't play full screen), but this trick never worked again for me.

The only workaround I found : Learn to use keyboard shortcuts more and more, sometimes when I really have problems picking up an object (that's the hard part for me^^) I put the cursor out of the window, click outside, then put the cursor on the object I want to pickup and double click without moving the mouse.... I know... It's sad to get to this point !

I played guild wars for 2 years on Windows before getting my mac, was really overjoyed to see that crossover worked so perfectly... Until this mouse issue. It can sometimes really make the whole experience just annoying.

Thank you for this thread.

I was starting to think it was my mouse and was going to go buy a new one.

I, as well, am losing my cursor. It happened 3 times today and several times in the past.

I have read all the threads and they all make very good sense and are consistent with my playing.

I just wanted someone to know that this problem still is not fixed.

Thank you for your time in coming up with a solution for this issue.

(Crossover Games 7.1.1)
(Mac OS X 10.5.8)

Thank you!

Realized that clicking the "OK" button doesn't actually install the update and am 2 years behind on updates. Updated to 9.0 so I'm sure this will fix the problem. Please disregard my post.

--- little trick :

If you have application bar showing on the bottom of your mac screen, when the mouse dissapears you can bring your 'guild wars screen' (don't play full screen) closer to the application bar. Then move your mouse slowly upwards from the applications to the guild wars screen and you will be able to keep your 'windows mouse' in the game window... better than nothing , keeps you on track until you can reboot comfortably.