Guild Wars 2

I recently changed disk setup on my desktop computer and running RAID1 on BTRFS, this has it’s advantiges and disadvantiges, the main issue is that all data is stored in one file GW2.dat, which makes BTRFS to just read from one HDD at the time when reading the file. Had things been individual files, then files could be read from different HDDs at the same time, which makes load time a lot better.

Would it be possible to get support (or if there already is a such), which makes you to store all the data files directly on the file system instead of using the GW2.dat disk image?

I can see that it’s not optimal in NTFS, but would benefit everyone using EXT4, BTRFS, XFS, JFS as their file system.

Thanks in advance for an (official) answer.

Nope, it would not be possible.

To explain why. the dat-file is more then “just” a file containing all other files. It is also a database (hence the word .dat). It is used to contain the thousands of textures, sounds, models and have it reachable in a quick and easy way.

Any file system handles this differently and a .dat is the way to make sure it is universal and can be handled by any system.

While filesystems try to mimic the effects of a database, it is never as good as a real one cause it is made for a much broader scope. The dat-file database is made for one goal.

To speed loading time, better way is use SSD.
Another even better way : add more RAM, windows 7+ use all used RAM as disk cache. So a 16GB RAM + HDD PC can response even faster then a 4GB +SDD PC.(Write caching on and buffer flushing off and free ram is enough to hold the game’s footprint)

mercury ranique.2170:

Nope, it would not be possible.

To explain why. the dat-file is more then “just” a file containing all other files. It is also a database (hence the word .dat). It is used to contain the thousands of textures, sounds, models and have it reachable in a quick and easy way.

Any file system handles this differently and a .dat is the way to make sure it is universal and can be handled by any system.

While filesystems try to mimic the effects of a database, it is never as good as a real one cause it is made for a much broader scope. The dat-file database is made for one goal.

I am pretty sure the filesystem is not the reason that they use this format. Not every file system even supports files over 4GB.