Installing Guild Wars 2

Just a heads up: Guild Wars 2 now has a Free To Play (F2P) version of the game you can download. It has some restrictions if you see below at "Account Type Comparison", but you can essentially reach "end game" with a free account.

Info: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/play-for-free-today/
Account Type Comparison: https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/95982157
Register & DL: https://account.arena.net/register?alt=gw2
Wine Entry: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=26558

I actually haven't had the chance to find out yet as it still takes a little bit of setup, and I expect there will be some crowding to download it since the news is only a couple of days old. However, the system requirements indicate 25 GB total. It's likely the download is considerably smaller thanks to compression. I'll be downloading it over the next few days, although by the Launcher's indications, it's playable at around 1/3 of the total download.

https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/25390756

Ummm... there might be a slight problem. I was trying to download with the GW2 Launcher today, and after an hour or two, the RAM ran out. I have 8 GB of RAM and the game only required 2 GB, so it's a memory leak, memory not being cleared properly. It's been reported since long: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34342#c19

However, the really scary thing is, the RAM didn't free up after all Wine-associated and GW2-associated processes were killed. It stayed stuck at 800 MB of free RAM until I restarted my computer.

I don't even know how to mitigate this, although I'll certainly try to figure it out. For now, make sure you have some form of Swap, watch the memory closely, and close the launcher with the X-button when it gets too high usage, which I hope will help. No need to rush it as GW2 will be around for a long while still (I think they even started up the GW 1 servers again possibly).

*Not on Steam and likely never will be thanks to Valve's new terms:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2745308&highlight=guild wars

*The Wine AppDB listing mentions the recommended version: 1.7.38 , particularly the wine staging version. I'm not sure how to get a double buffering version of Wine (much less a wine staging version with double buffering), but I'm not too clear on whether it will help (I really only found out about it when you mentioned it). According to a source, it may actually require more RAM memory to use Double Buffering:
http://wiki.osdev.org/Double_Buffering#Disadvantages

*I did find a command line options list specific for Guild Wars 2, as well as Guild Wars 2 Wiki Wine guide:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_on_Wine

Some of the options may disable the launcher from showing (according to the description), so it may help. I'll try messing around with them a bit.

EUREKA! I found a good way to download without virtually any memory leak at all!

winestaging-1.7.38

*Download/Patch without Launcher:

Code:

unset HISTFILE
wine ./Gw2.exe -dx9single -autologin -nopatchui -email <your-email> -password <your-password> -windowed -image

*Run without Launcher:

Code:

unset HISTFILE
wine ./Gw2.exe -dx9single -autologin -nopatchui -email <your-email> -password <your-password> -windowed

The patch command uses about 150 MB and stays close to that level while patching/downloading, and all you see is the terminal, so look at an internet traffic monitor to see if it's downloading or look at the size of GW2.dat (22 GB). It will exit when it finishes. There may or may not be ~5 MB permanent RAM leak that will NOT be cleared after ending the download, but that may be subjective.

Running "unset HISTFILE" at any time (without quotes) in a terminal prevents anything typed in the terminal from being written to .bash_history , thus avoiding many forms of password breaches. This also means the command will not show up if you press up in the terminal, so write down the command in a file without the password and just fill it in every time. If you're unsure if your terminal behaves this way, you can test it with just random text first.

At the time of this writing, I only went through a few of the character creation steps and when I exited, there was NO permanent RAM leak. I'll report back (and on Wine AppDB) if/when I find any more problems and solutions after testing the actual game for a good while.

I'm using Wine.

Well, I would say solely the white "Launcher" that's started by Gw2.exe in "Program Files/Guild Wars 2/" is having the memory leak so far. The installer that's downloaded only puts a few files in Program Files and then automatically runs Gw2.exe in "Program Files/Guild Wars 2/", starting the white "Launcher" to download the game. So the white "Launcher" is having the memory leak, and preventing it from showing seems to prevent at least that memory leak.

According to the Wine AppDB bug submission above, there will also be a texture unloading problem that will cause a second, different memory leak, unfortunately. I'll have to see about that another day.

I installed it but the performance is really bad. Always less than 30 fps. Too bad I wanted to finish my main character. I swapped to linux a few months ago and I've never played it since.

I had everything turned to low as far as I remember. I will check out your tutorial however. It might be my pc specs but I can't afford an upgrade anytime soon. ( athlon x2 250, gt 220, 4gb of rams). But on windows I did get at least 30 fps constant pretty much everywhere except areast with a lot of people.

That's weird... I didn't get bad performance when I was playing I'm not sure if I ever did a guide and provided the binaries I was using as I'm pretty sure I made a few edits to WINE.



Of course if there was a LOT of people things would get pretty shaky.



Overall though one should be able to play it without worries, just don't step into WvW or crowded places... or at the very least turn settings to low. in terms of people around you.

If I find the WINE I compiled I'll share it here. Note I use GT 440... and weirdly it's faster than booman's D: anyway, man... I hate being unemployed.

If he has a gt 440 and gets that performance maybe the bottleneck isn't the GPU but the CPU. Anyway I can't get an upgrade for neither. I just want a smooth 30 fps. allenskd what modifications did you do to wine ? I really wanna play it with decent fps.