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Command & conquer
These past few weeks I've gotten hooked on Guild Wars 2, which was released on August 28th. However, as I'm on vacation, I was placed in the position of having to rely on Wine.
I tend to prefer running games natively. However, I've gotten it working fairly well via PlayOnLinux (the only exceptions are the embedded webpages for the Black Lion Trading Company and looking with the mouse, both are solved using patched versions of Wine). Long story short, if you want to play the game in Wine, keep on reading. For anyone who isn't aware of it, Guild Wars 2 is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game from ArenaNet. It offers 5 different classes, 8 professions (called classes in most MMOs), and features such as dynamic events (as opposed to classes, these are events that spawn semi-randomly over the map, giving you a more immersive game), and a personalized story for each character you create. For anyone skeptical about it: I've started about 8 different characters since the 3rd Beta Weekend event, and each one has had a significantly different story. The game is buy-to-play (as opposed to free-to-play or pay-to-play). What that means is that once you buy the game, you own it and can play it (like most non-MMO games). The game is currently going for between 45 and 65€ (60-80 USD).
Versions of Wine I used: 1.5.9-raw3 originally (the raw input patch is required to be able to rotate the camera via mouse). However, at the time of writing, PlayOnLinux also offers a -guildwars2 series of Wine versions, that include patches for raw input and the embedded webpages (see this bug report: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27168#c41). I get slightly fewer FPS with this version of wine (1.5.12-guildwars2), but I haven’t been using it for long. There are numerous versions of -guildwars2 patches, so some older versions may offer slightly better performance. According to the PlayOnLinux forums, 1.4.1-guildwars2 offers the best performance, and 1.5.11 can lead to issues with alsa. Anyone not using PlayOnLinux can patch their version of Wine with the corresponding patches.
The screenshots were taken at the highest graphical settings possible on my laptop, but they were by no means the maximum settings available.
The easiest way to set up the Wine installation is to use PlayOnLinux, and, after enabling the testing repository, installing Guild Wars 2 via the interface. If, however, you dislike using PlayOnLinux, you simply need to download the installer and execute it. It will begin a download, roughly 10MB, if I remember correctly. Once the download finishes, you may be greeted by a black screen—if this is the case, you'll need to work blind for a second. The button you need to press is in the lower-left quadrant of the window. It was roughly 1/5th of the way from the bottom, and 1/5th to 1/6th of the way from the left of the window for me. It will pop open a new window asking you for the install location. I wouldn't recommend changing the default path too much, but so long as it ends up in the correct Wine folder, it shouldn't be an issue. Once you've selected the path, hit the “okay” button. In newer versions of the installer, the button may be the direct “install” button, but if it says “okay” and nothing happens, the install button should be in roughly the same spot as the first button, but on the other side of the window.
For anyone not interested in fighting with a black screen, you can easily start the installation from a Windows PC, and copy the resulting Guild Wars 2 folder. It also works in a Virtual Machine. I wouldn't recommend letting the game patch in a VM though, since the resulting folder can get rather large. Once you've gotten the Gw2.exe, Gw2.dat, and Gw2.tmp, you're basically ready to patch your game.
In order to patch your game, you'll need to create some sort of launcher, so that you can pass an argument to Gw2.exe. If you're using PlayOnLinux, you can do this by choosing Configure, and adding -dx9single to the arguments field. This stops the black screen issue (and also the perpetual connection attempt). If you're using plain old Wine, you'll just need to either create a .desktop file (I haven't tested arguments in these sorts of files, but it should work), or else a bash file that looks something like this:
#!/bin/bash wine $PATH/Gw2.exe -dx9single
This worked for me during the beta weekends (since then, I've switched to PlayOnLinux in order to have easy access to the raw input patches). It's also recommended that you have d3dx9, gecko, and mono installed. (Though both gecko and mono don't appear to have an impact, it's better to have them and not need them).
Once your launcher is created, you're all ready to start patching (trust me, it can take a while). Some people report intermittent crashes of the launcher when using Wine, but I didn't have this issue. If you want to risk leaving it unattended as it downloads, you can give it a shot, but you may need to restart the launcher occasionally.
Hopefully I've appealed to any MMO fans with this article. If I have, and you'd like to see these sorts of articles continuing, please let me know (along with any names of games you'd like to see covered – if I can get it working, I'll cover it). In case you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about this article (or ideas for future articles), you can reach me at lswest34@gmail.com. If you do email me, please include FCM or C&C in the subject line, so I don't overlook the email. Also, if anyone is playing Guild Wars 2 and has any suggestions to make it run better (or want to share some tips/ask questions), you're also welcome to email me. My home world is Gandara, but, thanks to the guesting feature, odds are I should be able to help out just about anyone.