Guild Wars 2

Hello, I’ve been trying to find a way to run two unique clients of Guild Wars 2 on the same machine. I’ve tried to contact ArenaNet for support, but this is not something that they are able to give assistance with. They recommended to find or start a thread on the forums.

I’m looking for someone that can either help me out with the steps to installing GW2 on a Virtual Machine or any alternative to achieve two unique clients on one machine.

I have tried using VMware Player, but when attempting to install GW2 (or just the launcher?) it only got to about 10.2kb, stopped, relaunched, asked for administration to make changes (I hit yes), and then stops completely. Relaunching will start back at zero, get back up to about 10.2kb and repeat.

I’ve also tried launching the gw2.exe from the file in GW2’s folder to try and download the .dat. On the launcher it will not show how much it’s downloaded or the rate in which it’s downloading (staying at 0kb and 0kb/second), however refreshing the folder that GW2 is in shows the .dat file size increasing. I left this run over night to get the ~17gb file size. The only way to close this launcher was to Al+F4 / Windows Task Manager and end it. This also did not work.

If anyone has had experience with this or knows a guide in which I can refer to, I would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Hmm, I take it you’re using Windows 7 as the Guest OS? Did you install VMWare Tools?

Some other things to try are:
- Updating the Guest OS fully (Windows 7 takes like 4-5 WU runs and reboots to be complete; keep repeating till no updates are found)
- Update DirectX on the Guest OS via dxwebsetup (or June 2010 of a redist)
- Verify/Enable 3D acceleration (have to shutdown the Guest OS and toggle an experimental setting I believe)

The launcher afaik requires some form of hardware-acceleration to proceed past a certain point, but I could be wrong about this.

Thank you for the very quick response. I finally got around to trying the suggestions you had. I first tried you three bullets that you suggested: I tried each one, launched GW2 and then moved onto the next. None of these worked. I thought that they might, as I completely forgot about the Windows Updates. I noticed that I wasn’t able to install NVidia Drivers as it wasn’t recognizing a graphics card.

However, I came back and re-read your post: I hadn’t installed VMWare Tools and with a bit of fiddling around managed to get it installed. One Virtual Machine reboot later, Guild Wars has now successfully launched (via the .exe in the GW2 folder). It seems as though the VMWare Tools was the missing key component.

Thank you for the help!

I still have some tweaking to make it work pretty well as far as mouse performance goes, but it seems to be running at 80+ FPS on lowest settings without a frame limit. (Far more than I was expecting on a VM).

80+ FPS is pretty impressive. What’s your processor and GPU, along with host and guest OS?

Last time I tried GW2 under VMware Player, framerate was pretty unideal (10 or less I think) on lowest settings; on Windows I could get 30 FPS (outside WvW) most of the time on highest settings. This was on a Ubuntu Host OS + Windows XP Guest OS. I’ll have to give it another try in the near future though.

As for the mouse, I’ve heard of VMware Workstation having some setting for a “gaming-optimized” cursor. I haven’t heard of this setting existing in Player for some reason though… I’m almost certain this mouse mode is needed for any game that has a 3D camera though, but I think I heard someone use a trick like plugging in 2 physical mice or something like that.

I have an i5-2320 with a GTX 560ti. My monitors are 1920×1080 + 1280×1024

Both the host and the GuestOS/VM is a Window 7 operating system. (64 bit)

Guest GW2 was on “Highest Performance” (Lowest possible graphical settings) while in some part of Queensdale with the Frame Limiter set at Unlimited. The resolution was pretty low at the time. Increasing the resolution to something more bearable will likely drop it further from 80 FPS.

My issue (although low priority at the moment) with the mouse is that when I hold right click and drag in one direction., it will eventually “hit the side of the screen” and stop moving. Where as in a normal GW2 client, you could spin around in circles endlessly while clicking-and-dragging in one direction.

OP: You’ll want to be careful with running GW2 in a VM AND on the host OS at the same time. It can crash your system if you over utilize the VM.

I would put a FPS Limit of 35-45 on the VM, in the VM options set the shared Video Ram to be 512MB (it will use more dynamically, but 512MB is reserved for the VM when its launched), and make sure nested paging is enabled (for better memory management). that will help with over all performance between the VM and Host when BOTH are running the same application.

@sirsquishy – I haven’t been able to find any settings in VMWare Player that will let me customize the video card usage and therefor haven’t been able to set “Video Ram.” I can set limits for number of processors (cores?) and RAM usage. Which is at 2 and 2gb respectively at the moment. (Host/System is 4 cores and 6gb)

While the GuestOS GW2 on lowest settings “can” achieve 80 fps in an idle area, I’ve no intention to keep it that way and will cap it (via GW2) at either 30 or 60, likely 30.

Are there other tools o settings in VMWare Player that I’m just not noticing?