Guild Wars 2

Hi. I know that in the past, there were similar threads, but all I have found is locked under old suggestions forum. So…nowdays Arena.Net tries to modify the servers infrastructure, adding the new Megaserver feature. In this case, is the Linux support planned…along with these new updates?

probably not since the game is a Direct X 9.0c game.

I think our best bet would be to put pressure on the WINE developers to improve the performance of games that are designed take advantage of multicore CPU’s.

NCSoft has pretty much ruled out making a Linux client but maybe if we keep the pressure up they’ll reconsider.

That said, if and when they get around to developing a Linux client, I think they should consider making it for Wayland instead of X so that all the video frames run sequentially.

My understanding is that X sometimes runs video frames out of sequence so frame 200 can come before frame 199 and that can make the game appear buggy when the real problem is with the X server which NCSoft has no control over.

I manage to play GW2 on WINE, with a GTX 295 (nouveau driver) running the show but, understandably, the fps are subpar (still manageable) and the environmental shaders are all messed up (which makes shiverpeaks or corrupted areas so much fun)

while Wayland is probably going to make things a lot better for me, i really hope they reconsider making a native linux client. there’s nothing i can think of that cannot be translated from Direct X to proper OpenGL

here’s to hoping valve’s involvement with linux is going to urge more companies to throw us more than a bone…

smekras.8203:

I manage to play GW2 on WINE, with a GTX 295 (nouveau driver) running the show but, understandably, the fps are subpar (still manageable) and the environmental shaders are all messed up (which makes shiverpeaks or corrupted areas so much fun)

while Wayland is probably going to make things a lot better for me, i really hope they reconsider making a native linux client. there’s nothing i can think of that cannot be translated from Direct X to proper OpenGL

here’s to hoping valve’s involvement with linux is going to urge more companies to throw us more than a bone…

If they didn’t create a native client for mac then it seems unlikely they would make one for linux. Also would make sense for them to get the mac client sorted out first.

John Yanez.5486:

I think our best bet would be to put pressure on the WINE developers to improve the performance of games that are designed take advantage of multicore CPU’s.

NCSoft has pretty much ruled out making a Linux client but maybe if we keep the pressure up they’ll reconsider.

That said, if and when they get around to developing a Linux client, I think they should consider making it for Wayland instead of X so that all the video frames run sequentially.

My understanding is that X sometimes runs video frames out of sequence so frame 200 can come before frame 199 and that can make the game appear buggy when the real problem is with the X server which NCSoft has no control over.

This is already happening. The CSMT patches are being integrated into the main branch. But don’t expect it to help much, most of the problem is not Wine but that GW2 has a very terrible engine performance-wise.

It runs bad even on Windows, and even if you have a really good PC.

We’re hitting up to 250% CPU usage (2.5x cores) with the latest release of WineGW2 and NVIDIA threaded optimizations, which is pretty much the maximum that most games can use and still only running about 30 FPS in Rata Sum on low to medium settings on a AMD 1100T at 3.3GHz and Intel Core i7 at 2.2GHz and GTX480 video card which is still very powerful by MMO standards….

By the way the problem you listed does not exist anymore. NVIDIA’s OpenGL library sends commands directly to their kernel driver, only using the X server as a conduit. Performance in Linux is pretty much optimal now.

You can see this in “pure” OpenGL games that get very high FPS.

Hannelore.8153:

John Yanez.5486:

I think our best bet would be to put pressure on the WINE developers to improve the performance of games that are designed take advantage of multicore CPU’s.

NCSoft has pretty much ruled out making a Linux client but maybe if we keep the pressure up they’ll reconsider.

That said, if and when they get around to developing a Linux client, I think they should consider making it for Wayland instead of X so that all the video frames run sequentially.

My understanding is that X sometimes runs video frames out of sequence so frame 200 can come before frame 199 and that can make the game appear buggy when the real problem is with the X server which NCSoft has no control over.

This is already happening. The CSMT patches are being integrated into the main branch. But don’t expect it to help much, most of the problem is not Wine but that GW2 has a very terrible engine performance-wise.

It runs bad even on Windows, and even if you have a really good PC.

We’re hitting up to 250% CPU usage (2.5x cores) with the latest release of WineGW2 and NVIDIA threaded optimizations, which is pretty much the maximum that most games can use and still only running about 30 FPS in Rata Sum on low to medium settings on a AMD 1100T at 3.3GHz and Intel Core i7 at 2.2GHz and GTX480 video card which is still very powerful by MMO standards….

By the way the problem you listed does not exist anymore. NVIDIA’s OpenGL library sends commands directly to their kernel driver, only using the X server as a conduit. Performance in Linux is pretty much optimal now.

You can see this in “pure” OpenGL games that get very high FPS.

When I had Windows 7 (before my 1TB Seagate Barracuda called it quits), this game was awesome, now that I have to use WINE, this game is awful.

I have a ATI Radeon HD 5770 and if I use the open source drivers the fan runs at full speed and temperature exceeds 75C so I use the proprietary drivers.

John Yanez.5486:

Hannelore.8153:

John Yanez.5486:

I think our best bet would be to put pressure on the WINE developers to improve the performance of games that are designed take advantage of multicore CPU’s.

NCSoft has pretty much ruled out making a Linux client but maybe if we keep the pressure up they’ll reconsider.

That said, if and when they get around to developing a Linux client, I think they should consider making it for Wayland instead of X so that all the video frames run sequentially.

My understanding is that X sometimes runs video frames out of sequence so frame 200 can come before frame 199 and that can make the game appear buggy when the real problem is with the X server which NCSoft has no control over.

This is already happening. The CSMT patches are being integrated into the main branch. But don’t expect it to help much, most of the problem is not Wine but that GW2 has a very terrible engine performance-wise.

It runs bad even on Windows, and even if you have a really good PC.

We’re hitting up to 250% CPU usage (2.5x cores) with the latest release of WineGW2 and NVIDIA threaded optimizations, which is pretty much the maximum that most games can use and still only running about 30 FPS in Rata Sum on low to medium settings on a AMD 1100T at 3.3GHz and Intel Core i7 at 2.2GHz and GTX480 video card which is still very powerful by MMO standards….

By the way the problem you listed does not exist anymore. NVIDIA’s OpenGL library sends commands directly to their kernel driver, only using the X server as a conduit. Performance in Linux is pretty much optimal now.

You can see this in “pure” OpenGL games that get very high FPS.

When I had Windows 7 (before my 1TB Seagate Barracuda called it quits), this game was awesome, now that I have to use WINE, this game is awful.

I have a ATI Radeon HD 5770 and if I use the open source drivers the fan runs at full speed and temperature exceeds 75C so I use the proprietary drivers.

That may be, but countless threads on this forum suggest its the game engine. Granted, Wine has some overhead for the D3D to OpenGL translation, but both CSMT and NVIDIA threaded optimizations work together to solve the multicore issues.

One problem is that this game is DirectX 9, which is not thread-safe. That means that its ability to use multiple cores was already limited.

I wonder if there’s anyone here who can honestly say that they’ve played Guild Wars 2 under WINE and consistently get more than 50 fps while standing in the bank at Divinity’s Reach and if ‘Yes’ if any of those people are using an ATI video card.
I’m lucky if I get just 15 fps.

It really wouldn’t make sense to make a native Linux client. Just dealing with the huge number of distributions and their individual packaging requirements would be needlessly time consuming, and that doesn’t even approach the issues with different versions of system libraries for each distribution. There’s a reason every distribution compiles everything from source for their own repositories.

If they made a Winelib executable like they did for the Mac version, or distributed a “Wine Bottle”, it wouldn’t be any different than just using Wine the normal way. Installing Wine on Linux is very easy, and if it isn’t attached to the application you’re running, you can include custom patches to fix bugs.

Expecting ArenaNet to devote resources to writing and maintaining an OpenGL graphics pipeline for MacOS/Linux is just insane. They barely have time to maintain the Direct3D renderer.

That said, I do hope that ArenaNet at least tries to avoid making changes that completely break Wine, and since those would likely break the Mac version too, I guess we’re pretty lucky so far.

Because no Linux thread would be complete without specs, I’m running the game under Gentoo Linux 3.14 with an Intel i5-3570, 8G RAM at 1600MHz and a GTX 760 (binary drivers) with Wine 1.7.15 using the CSMT patchset, and I get 40-60 FPS (capped at vsync) just about everywhere at maximum graphics settings. (performance is CPU-bound) Without the CSMT patchset, it usually averages 20-40.

However, ever since the EFLA release, the game crashes with an OOM error every hour or so, I have the same “c0000005” crashes as the Mac version, there is frame rate jitter when resources load from disk, and all paths of CoE become practically unplayable after about halfway through for some reason. Otherwise, and especially before the EFLA release, everything works great. It’s completely playable, and I’ve been doing so for just over a year.

ZDBioHazard.8246:

It really wouldn’t make sense to make a native Linux client. Just dealing with the huge number of distributions and their individual packaging requirements would be needlessly time consuming.

If they made a Winelib executable like they did for the Mac version, or distributed a “Wine Bottle”, it wouldn’t be any different than just using Wine the normal way. Installing Wine on Linux is very easy, and if it isn’t attached to the application you’re running, you can include custom patches to fix bugs.

Expecting ArenaNet to devote resources to writing and maintaining an OpenGL graphics pipeline for MacOS/Linux is just insane. They barely have time to maintain the Direct3D renderer.

That said, I do hope that ArenaNet at least tries to avoid making changes that completely break Wine.

Because no Linux thread would be complete without specs, I’m running the game under Gentoo Linux 3.14 with an Intel i5-3570, 8G RAM at 1600MHz and a GTX 760 (binary drivers) with Wine 1.7.15 using the CSMT patchset, and I get 40-60 FPS just about everywhere at maximum graphics settings. (performance is CPU-bound) Without the CSMT patchset, it usually averages 20-40.

However, ever since the EFLA release, the game crashes with an OOM error every hour or so, I have the same “c0000005” crashes as the Mac version, there is frame rate jitter when resources load from disk, and all paths of CoE become practically unplayable after about halfway through for some reason. Otherwise, and especially before the EFLA release, everything works great. It’s completely playable, and I’ve been doing so for just over a year.

The game is leaking texture memory for unkown reasons. We haven’t yet been able to track down the problem (its likely in Wine, not GW2), but setting “Medium” or “Low” can buy you another hour or two.

The game has this behavior in Windows XP 32-bit, but for some reason its coming out on Linux even on 64-bit systems when it shouldn’t.

With recent improvements I no longer crash at 3.2GB, but at 3.7GB.

As one of the previous posters mentioned Valve is making a strong push towards Linux so I think it would be hard to rule it out completely. You can already run games on linux with graphics card makers adding driver support for linux.

Hannelore.8153:

The game is leaking texture memory for unkown reasons. We haven’t yet been able to track down the problem (its likely in Wine, not GW2), but setting “Medium” or “Low” can buy you another hour or two.

The game has this behavior in Windows XP 32-bit, but for some reason its coming out on Linux even on 64-bit systems when it shouldn’t.

With recent improvements I no longer crash at 3.2GB, but at 3.7GB.

Awesome, I’ve been “debugging” this in my head for the last couple weeks and have come to the same anecdotal explanation. I’ve been playing with Low textures, for exactly that reason, and can make it through a whole fractal set and then some without crashing. Glad to know someone is working on it for reals.

If you happen to be a developer working on this issue, I’d be happy to test patches, run backtraces or whatnot. I’ve become pretty familiar with patching and building Wine and have a few systems I can test on. I’ve been watching Wine bug #34342, but nothing seems to be happening there.

can’t say i’ve experienced any noticeable memory leaks, but i’ve recently saw that performance is a lot better when i tell wine to create a virtual desktop first instead of just running the game, even when i’m playing a full screen video on the second monitor

all that without the CSMT patches btw

About the CSMT patches, I’ve noticed that when I use them, my frame rate is either awesome (55-60+) or really bad (15-20), depending on how many “objects” are in the area, and can go from awesome to bad and back to awesome very abruptly. Without CSMT, it’s pretty consistently “ehh” (20-30) just about everywhere.

From watching my system with htop/nvidia-settings while playing, most of the “really bad” moments do not result in high CPU or GPU load, so it’s probably still a thread lock contention somewhere. I just lack the familiarity with threading or the Wine code base to do any meaningful debugging on it.

My favorite part of the CSMT patch set is that it fixes the long-standing armor switch texture bug. I keep meaning to bisect witch patches fix that so I can backport and report them somewhere.

About this thread, as long as ArenaNet doesn’t actively shut down our discussions about Linux or Wine, I’m okay that they don’t “officially” support it. We Linux devotees are used to helping each other out to solve our own problems, we just need a place to communicate, and who knows, we might even produce a patch that might fix something for the Mac version someday.

A Linux port may be possible if it was a portable app.

That essentially means that the entire thing is packaged in a way that it can be moved from system to system and will still run without depending on the underlying system. Typically, this involves using special software suite to pack all the dependancies and everything into one executable (typically ELF), so if the system has a Linux kernel, an X server and OpenGL, it will run.

Guild Wars 2 is already a portable app on Windows if you ignore the DirectX runtime, unlike other games which must be painstakingly installed first.

Hannelore.8153:

A Linux port may be possible if it was a portable app.

That essentially means that the entire thing is packaged in a way that it can be moved from system to system and will still run without depending on the underlying system. Typically, this involves using special software suite to pack all the dependancies and everything into one executable (typically ELF), so if the system has a Linux kernel, an X server and OpenGL, it will run.

Guild Wars 2 is already a portable app on Windows if you ignore the DirectX runtime, unlike other games which must be painstakingly installed first.

I’d absolutely pass out if JUST the OpenGL support was implemented… then the only complaint with using Wine would be gone.

Hannelore.8153:

A Linux port may be possible if it was a portable app.

That essentially means that the entire thing is packaged in a way that it can be moved from system to system and will still run without depending on the underlying system. Typically, this involves using special software suite to pack all the dependancies and everything into one executable (typically ELF), so if the system has a Linux kernel, an X server and OpenGL, it will run.

Guild Wars 2 is already a portable app on Windows if you ignore the DirectX runtime, unlike other games which must be painstakingly installed first.

Distribution maintainers would still complain that it has to be installed in /opt or whatever, and that it doesn’t use system libraries, not to even mention the “impure license,” so it would be restricted to random external PPAs or overlays, which is almost as bad as the Wine situation now.

A huge static binary would probably be okay for Steam or something though. In any case, I’d imagine ArenaNet would want to avoid duplicating the support nightmare that’s going on in the Mac forums right now, due to “official support” for a Wine-based port.

The way I see it, if Steam OS goes well, maybe we can have an official Guild Wars 3 client. /shrug

I don’t think that making an RPM that works with all of the popular GNU/Linux distributions would be too difficult although I would expect NCSoft to target a specific family of distros, most likely Ubuntu or Debian and if they choose the former then it should also work on Linux Mint.

I quit playing for over a year because it was impossible to play when it took 15 minutes to cross the traders forum in Lion’s Arch, before the destruction that is. I’ve been using Linux exclusively for years and refuse to let Windows anywhere near my computer. As far as I’m concerned, it’s persona non grata. Some have suggested to just buy a copy of Windows and go on with my day. That’s simply not something I’m willing to do. Yes, I know there’s other ways to acquire a copy, but honestly I don’t even think it’s worth pirating. (Windows did lose all of my data when it so graciously allowed a website’s PHP script download an .exe file and blow away my partition tables before I had a chance to stop it, after all.)

Now that we have the Steam client for Linux as well as other developers joining every day, I have amassed a nice collection of games. I’ve come back to Guild Wars 2 for the past few weeks and it seems that nothing has changed, except now I have no clue what people are talking about when they mention Scarlet, the Aetherblade, the Zephyrites, etc. I made a conscious decision to no longer financially support any game that does not offer a Linux version, or at minimum, verify that it can actually run well under Wine. (Although, a native version is preferred.)

We Linux users should face facts though. ANet will not make a native version, no matter how much we want them to. Numerous other threads spanning over a year with not so much as a “get stuffed” from the developers is our answer. Guild Wars 1 has been out for awhile and the “official” position is that it works well enough under Wine, so just use that.

If the developers ever open this thread — here’s something to think about: The more money I spend in Steam means less potential money I have to spend in the gem store. It also means that the more native versions I have, I won’t have a need to buy your next expansion pack.