Guild Wars 2

MaxOS.7531:

Hey guys!
First of all, thanks for the new client.

You stated you were not planning to use Metal instead of OpenGL.
But what if you used MoltenGL (https://moltengl.com) to increase performance? As far as I understood implementing it won’t require you to completely rewrite (again?) the OpenGL Engine while using Metal to boost performance and quality!

Would that be an option for you guys at all or in the (near) future?

Oh, cool! I’ll have to look into that (for my own curiosity… I don’t work at Anet or anything). I’m not sure that OpenGL ES and OpenGL are as closely related as their names would imply. Using Vulkan would require another complete rewrite (although at least they’d be able to add that rendering engine to their windows client as well). Also, Metal requires a newer OS (and video card) than their current minimum system requirements (my 2008 Mac Pro, which meets the sys reqs, only supports Metal because I put a GTX 760 in it several years ago). It’d really suck if players with older hardware suddenly couldn’t run the game anymore.

Menadena.7482:

Doryx.9182:

The new client uses an insane quantity of ram.
12GB (all the 8GB of ram + swap) in less than an hour of gameplay, it’s not normal.
From what my friends on windows tell me, 5-6GB is a normal usage.
I’m a bit worried by the huge swap usage, I don’t want to kill shorten my ssd life for nothing…

If you can put in more ram to avoid swapping. Macsales.com has vids on how to do it. Both more ram and having an SSD are huge upgrades for your computer, I always put in much more of both than I need.

Yep. Unless your CPU & GPU are just horrible, maxing out your RAM and putting the OS & applications on an SSD are probably the two biggest things you can do to make your computer faster.

Menadena.7482:

Yay! Thank you!!!! I know what I am downloading to my SSD tonight!

Hmm, currently the 32 bit is on my HDD. I wonder if it will still see the resources since I put it in a nonstandard place or if it will try re-downloading? Oh well, even if it means I do not get a chance to play with it until tomorrow it will be like a prezzie waiting to be unwrapped.

It didn’t see my the .dat file from my 32-bit client even though they were right next to each other. They were (well, are) not in /Applications, though.

2008 Mac Pro
GTX 760
16GB RAM
macOS 10.12.5

YAY!!!!! So far, the only issues I’ve come across while running around DR are the stuttering others have noted, the “autodetect” functionality for the graphics settings is a bit, um, optimistic (although I’m not sure it’s any worse than the 32-bit client), and in windowed mode, I can move the window so that it spans two screens but it’ll snap back to my main monitor’s width if I try to resize it.

Jacques.8170:

FWIW – GW2 Mac client does not run on a Mac Pro with a non-standard graphics card. I tried the GTX 970 and no go. I only got the client to start with the 5770 and GTX 680 cards.

I’ve been running GW2 on my mac with a non-standard GPU for years. GTX 760.

Yes, or at least it works for me. I can’t remember if I worked before I checked some of the “Mac” boxes in the general settings, though.

HippieJoel.9537:

BDave.9386:

There is one thing that might be a cider glitch that I actually like. I use the Dvorak keyboard layout, and GW2 just automatically figured it out… I didn’t have to remap anything (well, until I switched to ESDF from WASD) and the in-game tool-tips knew it (“press ‘I’ to loot”, etc). If that’s intentional, well done, Anet!

Funnily enough it’s actually a feature in WINE.

I’m pretty impressed to discover that I’m not the only Guild Wars 2 playing Mac using Dvorak user.

The issue with this “feature” however is that it sets the keybinds differently internally so if you reboot into Windows you’ll find yourself having to change all of the keybinds to be correct in Windows after playing in OS X.

I did not know that… cool!

Yeah, I’d noticed the keybinding “issue” when I was using the PlayOnMac wrapper for a while… Not a big deal for me personally, though, because at the time I was pretty much just logging in to get the daily reward.

Oh, well. It certainly won’t be hard to enter my “custom” key bindings when the native mac client comes out.

More weirdness! In my system preferences, I set the problematic monitor’s resolution to “Default for display” instead of “Scaled” because I wasn’t scaling it anyway, and now GW2 works on that monitor! Could turning on display scaling (even though it’s not being used) cause two different code paths to report a different # of pixels or something? Like 1920×1200 vs 1920.0×1200.0 and maybe there’s a difference in how the two sets of numbers round to the nearest floating point value? Dunno… I don’t have the monitor I was using a month ago with me out here, so I can’t plug it in and see if it was set to default or scaled.

papsu.6094:

+1 for new Mac client. Nothing can be worse than a crash and losing the instance. I feel like a masochist right now playing regularly with all the crashes. But I am not going to install Windows for GW2 and deal with its associated problems.

Aside from the issues in my thread about immediately crashing, I haven’t had the frequent crashing issues since a few patches after HoT came out. That said, I typically only really play the story and PvE content. So other than Dragon’s Stand (I think I’m currently at maybe 2/5 for getting through that map’s meta without crashing in the final fight), I’m generally not in the crashy parts of the game. I avoided raids when they first came out so that I wouldn’t hurt everyone else on the team, and haven’t gotten around to trying them yet, so I can’t comment on that.

Mostly I’m looking forward to better macOS integration (like, I’m really hoping to be able to drag to resize the window), less general glitchiness (for instance, I’ve got a real professional-level external sound “card” that I can’t use with GW2 because cider insists on only working with the built-in outputs), hopefully better performance (particularly in regard to multithreaded performance, but that’s not a macOS-specific issue), and general feature-parity with the 64-bit Windows client. All those hi-res textures and whatnot.

There is one thing that might be a cider glitch that I actually like. I use the Dvorak keyboard layout, and GW2 just automatically figured it out… I didn’t have to remap anything (well, until I switched to ESDF from WASD) and the in-game tool-tips knew it (“press ‘I’ to loot”, etc). If that’s intentional, well done, Anet!

I have an update! I added a fourth monitor to my setup (one I’ve had for a while, but had moved to a different computer), in an inverted “T” arrangement so that I effectively have a 1920×2400 monitor flanked by two 1920×1080 monitors. If I have the menu bar at the top of the T, GW2 does the insta-crash again, but if the menubar is anywhere else, it works fine. It doesn’t even crash if I move the menubar after launching the app (although it does get confused about where the cursor is). So I guess for now I’ll just have to leave the system preferences open and move the menu bar around whenever I want to play.

Sure is weird… I hope the native mac client comes out soon, because this has got to be some weird interaction between GW2, cider, and the DX->OGL translation code.

(oh, FWIW, this “new” monitor has worked fine with GW2 in the past, back before I’d swapped it out with the monitor I’m currently using in the center)

Well, I’m done moving, and with my old monitor hooked up GW2 magically works again. No other changes to the system were made. I’ve never heard of a game engine crashing because of a monitor before, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. Maybe it’s a glitch with cider?

lead.7543:

Did you recently update your mac to sierra? If so, then there is no solution. I am not being negative but just factual.

oh you might want to look at this and cross your fingers that something stirs within Anet within the next 4 years…

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5067f9/timeline_of_official_statements_about_a_new/

Nope, still on 10.11.6

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

You can contact the Tech CS Team via the ‘Support’ link above/below and ‘Submit a Request’ for assistance.

Good luck.

Oh, I know… I don’t have time to really play at the moment anyway, and Play on Mac is good enough to log in for dailies. I’ll open a trouble ticket when I’m done moving, if nobody’s found a solution. In the mean time, I figure having a thread about it might help if someone else has the same problem.

Nothing? I downloaded the installer again, and did a clean reinstall again. Still crashes with that same error before it can do anything else.

abomally.2694:

Most of what you are referring to are software bugs. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about as it relates to Guild Wars 2.

No, I’d missed that part, sorry.

abomally.2694:

BDave.9386:

abomally.2694:

Files ONLY get corrupted if there is a PC hardware problem -period.

Or if there’s a bug in the drive’s firmware, or a bug in the OS, or a bug in the software that’s trying to write the file, or the power goes out in the middle of writing a file and messes everything up, or a cosmic ray hits your DRAM and flips a bit (ECC memory shouldn’t require a Xeon, Intel!), or even just a simple case of data rot (which is especially nasty when the data in question belongs to the file system itself).

A power failure is very unlikely. Also, if the power fails during an install Windows uses a journaling file system, which means that the incomplete write would be marked as a failed write.

Nothing in your post relates to actual data “corruption” – unless there is a hardware issue such as bad RAM.

[Replied to this part at the top]

[…]

Incorrect data written to a file due to software bugs is not actual data corruption – it’s just incorrect data. Hardware problems can cause actual data corruption when the data would otherwise have been written correctly. THAT is what I was talking about and there’s a big difference between the two.

Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

A bit, yeah. My disagreement with you is mostly* in your claim that bad hardware is the only cause of data corruption.

Although rare (as you correctly pointed out), power failures/fluctuations can cause some SSDs (and probably some HDDs) to write bad data. Since, in this scenario, the write completes, a journaling filesystem won’t help. If the power supplied to the drive was momentarily out of spec, so you can’t really claim it’s “bad” hardware because of that one instance. Moving up the chain, the power supply must be bad then, right? Well, yeah, the computer’s power supply did momentarily put out “bad” power, but only because somebody crashed into a utility pole 5 blocks away, breaking one of the power lines, which caused surging and fluctuations in the remaining lines while things settled back down. This caused the power coming into your house to momentarily go out of spec. So the power supply isn’t “bad” per se, it just wasn’t designed to handle power that dirty. You could put a surge suppressor or UPS between your computer and the wall, but then I’ll just bring up lightning strikes and EMPs. Now, I’m not suggesting we stop using surge suppressors or UPSs. I’m just pointing out that everything is designed to work within a certain set of constraints, and that it’s pretty much always possible for the universe to put you outside of them. Once you’re in such a situation, the device isn’t “bad” simply because it did the wrong thing.

ECC memory solves a real problem (more so, as we start putting more RAM in our machines), but that doesn’t mean a flipped bit in non-ECC memory automatically indicates “bad” RAM, it’s just that the people who design consumer RAM are willing to tolerate an error rate that is, IMHO, too high.

Same thing for some causes of data rot… A few years ago, I had a drive spontaneously lose part of its filesystem data (hooray for backups!). Was the drive “bad”? Depends on how much you believe in the law of averages. The MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is exactly that: the mean, or average, not the minimum, time between instances of the drive writing, say, 0xFF, and then reading that same byte back as something else. Now, it’s been years since that drive tried to lose my data, and it’s worked fine ever since then. AFAICT, despite its early attempt at losing of some of my data, the drive hasn’t exceeded its MTBF spec. So, the drive is probably fine. I was just unlucky, both in the timing and in which particular piece of data it got wrong.

None of these issues are caused by bugs or bad hardware. With the possible except of dirty power (depending on where you live), they’re pretty rare, but they do happen.

*As to the role that bugs play, I believe you and I define “data corruption” differently. Shall we agree to disagree?

I don’t know the answer your question, but I’m curious as to your “workflow”… Why not just set it to windowed mode in the settings menu and leave it? To be clear, I’m not criticizing your choices, I just want to understand them. Maybe whatever you know that I don’t could make my life easier as well.

That’s… odd. Whenever I’ve had lag, it’s been both the gameplay and the chat. Well, lag bad enough for me to notice… I usually get low enough FPS that I probably wouldn’t notice a small amount of lag (curse you, parallelization difficulties! <shakes fist at math>).

I tried deleting GW2 (and the folder in Application Support again), and reinstalling. Same problem… it’s not even trying to download the data files. On the plus side, I have 20GB more room on my drive now, but I’d rather be playing GW2.

Oh, and I’m still running El Capitan (10.11.6, to be exact), so it’s not that.

abomally.2694:

Files ONLY get corrupted if there is a PC hardware problem -period.

Or if there’s a bug in the drive’s firmware, or a bug in the OS, or a bug in the software that’s trying to write the file, or the power goes out in the middle of writing a file and messes everything up, or a cosmic ray hits your DRAM and flips a bit (ECC memory shouldn’t require a Xeon, Intel!), or even just a simple case of data rot (which is especially nasty when the data in question belongs to the file system itself).

SkipperCZ.6912:

64b client for mac? :-(

I’ll be a bit surprised if the native client they’re working on isn’t 64-bit. Dunno when it’s coming out, though.

To be precise, “Exception: 80000101” is raised.

To be clear, when I say “immediately”, I mean before the login window appears or anything. The only thing I can think of that’s changed recently is that I switched monitors. GW2 has worked since the monitor change, so I don’t think that’s directly causing the issue. It might have started the first time I rebooted or went through a sleep/wake cycle after switching monitors — I can’t quite remember — but it definitely worked at least once. I can’t plug my old monitor back in to test because I’m getting ready to move and it’s already packed.

Rebooting didn’t help.
Deleting ~/Library/Application Support/Guild Wars 2 didn’t help.
Running “/Volumes/Large\ Apps/Guild\ Wars\ 2.app/contents/MacOS/cider —use-dos-cwd C:Gw2 -- C:\\GW2\\GW2.exe -repair” results in “Assertion failed: (bpp != 0), function DDRAW_width_bpp_to_pitch, file main.c, line 565.” on the terminal, then the error message about “Exception: 80000101” pops up, same as when launch it normally.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,
- Dave

Donari.5237:

A friend of mine had an interesting theory: dragons eat magic, the barrier was magic, Aurene hatched, was hungry, and blindly reached out and snacked without understanding the barrier was necessary for her own safety.

Oh, that’s an interesting idea! I wonder what it would mean for magic-wielding creatures who are near baby dragons?

Bjarkov.9751:

Something with an “S”.

Splashy McSplashface

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

psyt.9415:

Why didnt you guys chose Vulcan or Metal or something future proof? By the time this native OpenGL client comes out WoW and everyone else will be moved to low overhead APIs and Anet will be behind the times again just like with directx 9. Guess I shouldnt be complaining but I wonder why Anet never takes the time to be more future proof , if your doing it anyway why not do it on the API that gets more performance. OpenGL on OSX is still a version or two behind and with apple creating Metal I have a feeling it will be depricated on OSX.

Metal was never intended to be for larger complex games. It’s supposed to offer developers a language that will allow them to create games equivalent to iOS games for OSX. OpenGL is far more future proof than Vulcan or Metal.

It’s not a question of project “complexity”, Metal/Vulkan/DX12 are all lower-level APIs. They’re (theoretically) harder to work with, but will (theoretically) yield better results — particularly with regards to multi-threaded performance. My understanding is that OpenGL and versions of DX prior to 12 are part of why games tend to not use multiple cores very well.

While I’m disappointed that they chose to go with OpenGL (I’ve got eight cores, but they’re mostly unused even when my FPS drops to single-digits), I’m glad they’re working on a native OS X client, and I understand that it’s not always easy to find someone to work with newer technologies. Especially if they already had an OpenGL port of the engine laying around.

I don’t know, but I really wish someone would figure out how to do it… I’ve had to jump through a few hoops to with the GW2 window to be sized correctly (1920×1080) because GW2 normally doesn’t realize that there are options between 1920×1200 and 1600×1000 in windowed mode.

Also, being able to just stretch the window all willy-nilly like the PC version would be freakin’ awesome… I could stretch it across all three monitors!

Jon Olson.8439:

We can login and see some graphics. Physics is the next major step.

Yay! Thanks for letting us know :-)

HippieJoel.9537:

Regarding 64-bit, it’s very unlikely that it’ll ever work on OS X due to the way in which the OS X ABI handles CPU registers. In a nutshell, OS X uses a CPU register that Windows applications expect to be able to use.

Right… That’s why you’d have to recompile the app, and anything that it links with, using a compiler set to output the OS X ABI. AFAIK, unless you’re using assembly somewhere, the actual register usage is determined by the compiler.

WesleySnipes.3917:

Xillllix.3485:

Hey is Anet ever going to fix the annoying crashes?

It’s getting really annoying to crash in WvW every 20 minutes and then spend 30 minutes waiting in queue.

they only fix the client when they fix the windows version and by miracle it applies to our wrapper as well

It’s not “by miracle”, it’s just that there’s not much they can do to fix bugs caused by Cider itself.

HippieJoel.9537:

Regarding an x64 client for OS X:
As much as you don’t want to hear this, it’s most likely never going to happen. Short of ArenaNet writing a native Mac client anyway.

Yeah, I know. That’s why I thought the bit at the end of the 64-bit client announcement about “hopefully having an ETA for releasing a Mac version soon” (or whatever it said) was so interesting… Seems like they’d either say the OS X client will always be 32-bit or not mention it at all, unless they know something we don’t.

I wonder if there’s a compiler flag for not using the register(s) in question? Hmm… That’d solve the one issue, but I’m not sure how many others there might be.

WesleySnipes.3917:

The only way mac users can play (for a few hours maximum before crash) is by setting everything to rotten potato settings. I’ve never been able to see this game run properly with sweet graphics on the mac client, a 3 YEAR OLD BETA that has no deadline whatsoever. God i’d be surprise if they are even working on it

Unless there’s a native Mac client that they haven’t released at all yet, there’s not really anything to work on. The whole appeal of Cider is that it’s a wrapper for Windows apps, so there’s no need to actually write a Mac version. Well, in theory, anyway…

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Mahkno.7593:

pls fix mac client.
or
open the source and let us fix it for you.
native 64bit will result.
profit.

That’s simply not true. If it were true there would already be a 64 bit non-crashing version of GW2 running in Wine or Crossover, both of which are open source communities/technologies which use pretty much the exact same technology as Cider… Porting a game is incredibly difficult.

To think that the gaming community could somehow produce a native OS X OpenGL version of a Direct X game is beyond ridiculous. That requires a lot of money and coding and upkeep to ensure that every single change to the game works on both the Direct X and OpenGL version. A gaming community can’t do that…

I think the “it” in FlamingFoxx’s post referred to the game client, not Cider. And, in this case, you’d only have to worry about OpenGL (or, more likely, Metal, since that’s way better for multi-threading). Despite the shared “X”, MS hasn’t (and almost certainly never will) released DirectX on OS X.

goodbeerhunting.8942:

It’s a little disheartening, but I guess I understand why people still think changing config settings for an X11 driver that isn’t used has an effect (look at the “GraphicsDriver” setting. Cider uses a quartz-based driver, not X11.)

Yeah, I thought that was odd… Don’t know what to tell you, though, it made a definite difference on my system. Maybe there was a patch in between runs that I didn’t notice.

goodbeerhunting.8942:

It would be more helpful if they’d turn on the memory debug overlay so they could see when the client was almost of VM address space, and switch zones to free up some space and delay the inevitable crash.

You can do that in the config file. I’m not quite sure how to interpret the data, though, since it’ll say that there’s 2.1GB worth of allocations in 1.8GB of RAM (not a typo) as soon as GW2 launches. Seems like it’d insta-crash if that was the case… <insert joke about lag here>

ReaverKane.7598:

Beldin.5498:

ReaverKane.7598:

Overall the 64bit client seems to be the best option for me, but there’s a catch.
Although its quite more stable (haven’t had a crash since i started using it, as opposed to 1-2 daily after HoT launch), at random times it will stutter heavily, like almost like its about to crash, but then it goes back ok. According to windows resource monitor, there’s a peak on memory errors at those times… I don’t think its my ram that’s going haywire (its 3 months old and never had any issues with other games), is there any way i can pinpoint the issue (should help with the feedback)?

How many physical RAM do you have and how high is your load ? I guess its just
swapping memory to disk (virtuell memory) when you use too much of your
real memory.
And yes .. this can happen now .. the same as it could happen years ago when er
had less than 2 GB memory on 32-bit systems.

16GB. load at 40% usually.

What, exactly, does “memory errors” mean?

WesleySnipes.3917:

Changing rendering from subsample to native will give u better graphics overall

Super sampling gives the best performance on my system (2008 Mac Pro w/ GTX 760). It’s not a night & day difference, but it is (or was, haven’t checked in a while) a straight (as in, not a %), and pretty consistent gain of probably 2-4 FPS.

Which, combined with getting sometimes less than 15 FPS while my CPU & GPU utilization are both < 50%, is why it’s so frustrating to get low a FPS rate… Clearly the system’s capable of more, but something is holding it back.

Editing the config file to reflect my video cards actual amount of VRAM (shouldn’t that be auto-detected?) made my FPS a lot better out in the open world, but it still sucks in LA.

Cameirus.8407:

Nocta.5274:

There’s twio hero challenge locked behind ley line gliding. One in Dragon’s stand ( spider queen area ) and one in Auric Bassin.

So there’s that I guess too.

nothing in Aurics basin is locked behind lay line gliding.

Nor any other gimmick, I have 100% map completion there, and I dont have ley line gliding and I have not abused any of the “tricks” to get into certain areas.

You can legitimately get all points in AB without it, it may just require some convoluted gliding, and you will need lean techniques.

If Nocta’s referring to the one I think (s)he is, you don’t need gliding at all, at least to get past the ley-line bit… You can get to the other side with a Nuhoch Wallow. I remember gliding after that, but I can’t remember if I had to glide or if I was just doing it for fun.

Well, see the thing is when the original story came out, the Living World, as a story-telling medium, was just theoretical. Since they could plan the HoT story knowing that they could push stuff into Living World Season 3, maybe it was unrealistic for us to expect HoT to have the same “scope” of story right out of the box.

Even if that is the case, I stand by the comment I made on WP’s video: GW2 is a poorly told fantastic story, and HoT is a (relatively) poor story told fantastically. At least for all the lore-related reasons WP mentioned, it seems like the story writers were a bit out to lunch, but wow, whoever took their script and made a game out of it, y’all did a great job.

That said, aside from lack of an epilog, I didn’t notice any of these “issues” while I was playing it (which, in my mind, speaks to the how well they “gamified” the story). And while I don’t play GW2 as much now as I did before I finished the personal story, I still enjoy playing it, even though all I’m doing is the so-called “grindy” bits like map completion for the new zones, filling out my masteries, and unlocking the elite specs. So as a game, I think HoT is pretty good.

There should be some story/lore stuff in the first raid, and that comes out in “mid November”, which is… wow, not actually that long from now, so we might find out really soon if they’re doling out HoT’s story a bit at a time, or if it’s just a much shorter story arc.

Baolun.8316:

Shoe.5821:

We’ve always been trying to kill Faolain though

It’s not like we could get angrier at her

But Eir was willing to help her escape from Mordremoth, presumably both due to general decency and due to not wanting Mordy to get another powerful minion by corrupting her. And they were being chased by a Mordremoth minion when Faolain betrayed her! Taking time out to stab someone you don’t like while you’re actively being chased by a bigger threat is just plain dumb. Secure your own escape first, THEN betray the hero.

It’s the Halfling-Dragon Principle: “If you find yourself in the company of a halfling and an ill-tempered dragon, remember that you do not have to outrun the dragon; you simply have to outrun the halfling.”

Except Norn are like the opposite of Halflings, but they’re still slower than a dragon (minion).

Dlarnkk.1068:

Knighthonor.4061:

When DS Reset, do we stay in same map?

No, OP. After the map runs it courses for two hours. It’ll go into ‘Shutdown’ mode. Depending on results of the map. Those who beaten the map before two hours went up will not be knocked off, and teleported at very starting point of the map. Those who failed, are wiped off by map [AkA downed]. Then dies when they enter next map. Do you understand?

I think Knighthonor meant “do we stay in the same map instance?” Like, will all the same players still be in the same map?

Missy.7356:

Now a 64bit update has been done, does this mean that there will be no fix for the 32? Are we are doomed to be permanently crashing.

The developers say no (2nd from the bottom): https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/64-bit-Client-Beta-FAQ/page/2#post5719126

sniperman.1738:

I don’t know like you guys said 64bit systems will have more access well more like complete access to all there ram so technically there should be a good chunk of performance improvement if you guys do the 64bit client correct.

It’s not as simple as that. Switching to x86-64 from IA-32 changes three things:
1) Many more CPU registers (little bits of “instant-access” RAM embedded in the CPU). This can only make things faster, and depending (roughly) on how complicated the stuff you’re doing is, it can be by a large amount.
2a) A WAY HUGER address space. Like 1) this can only help, but the amount that it helps is much more variable.
2b) Memory addresses & executable code are twice as big. This makes CPU instructions and some data load half as fast (since they’re twice as big). This can only slow things down.
3) Hardware support for 64-bit integer math.

Now, 3) Doesn’t apply to GW2 (otherwise the 32-bit version would be getting, IDK, 0.003 frames per second). In most apps, it comes down to a fight between 1) and 2b) to see what net performance change is.

The performance impact of 2a) depends on how well you can prefetch stuff from the hard drive* and how much data you actually need at one time. A 32-bit address is 4GB (“the system” uses some of that, so realistically the usable amount is closer to 2-3.5GB). Now let’s say that the data for your game’s “world” takes up 100GB, but the data for any individual “map zone” is only 50MB. Having a larger address space wouldn’t directly** do anything for you because you can easily fit everything you need into a 32-bit space, with plenty of room left over to work on the data. But as each zone gets bigger, you start running out of room to work on the data (this is more or less what’s causing*** GW2’s current crashiness), so you have to start redoing calculations instead of just storing the answer, and if a “zone” crosses that 2-3GB barrier, it won’t fit in a 32-bit address space at all and you’d have to switch to 64-bit. Since GW2 was designed to run on a 32-bit OS, I’d expect the performance impact to be fairly minimal.

In theory, 32-bit vs 64-bit doesn’t affect stability at all, but because there’s more room for stuff to spread out, memory fragmentation is much less of an issue, which, in turn, mitigates any bugs in the way you’re allocating & deallocating memory.

*Not as big of a deal with SSDs, but still jaw-droppingly slow compared already having everything in RAM.

**It would, however, let you more easily “memory-map” the file, which might simplify some stuff, which in turn might increase performance. You know, depending on stuff and things.

It’s more accurate to say that the new maps are merely expose that a memory bug more often than the old maps. Once they fix the bug(s), it shouldn’t matter.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

In fact they wouldn’t do that because there are still plenty of people out there with 32 bit only computers. OS X doesn’t have that problem because since Lion it has been a 64 bit OS.

There may still be plenty of 32-bit computers in use, but I doubt many are still in use that are 32-bit only. To the best of my knowledge, every PC-oriented Intel CPU after the original Core Duo has been 64-bit, and they started the transition with the P4. Now, there are probably still lots of people running 32-bit versions of Windows, but that’s because MS has made the transition about as unnecessarily difficult as possible.

OS X has supported 64-bit apps (at least if you had a 64-bit CPU) since Tiger (10.4), in 2004. Lion (10.7) was the first version to require a 64-bit CPU. 10.8 was the first version that didn’t have a 32-bit kernel, and therefore required a 64-bit motherboard as well. If you do things correctly, you can run 64-bit code on a 64-bit CPU, even if your kernel and motherboard are only 32-bit.

But to get to what I think your point was, yeah, since GW2 requires 10.7 anyway, a native Mac client could 64-bit only without dropping support for users who are still stuck on older OSs.

cenobite.1506:

Well, they answered on reddit, that they know about problem. Still, they didn’t say if they’r looking for solution or eta.

I have no doubt whatsoever that they’re looking for solutions. They probably haven’t given us an ETA because tracking down memory bugs can be hard, and until they know what exactly is causing the issue, any ETA would be a bit of a shot in the dark.

I suspect that individual developers haven’t made any comments about it here because this is all “official company communications”, and they’re too busy trying to fix the problem to get something approved for posting. Although IMHO, the issue is widespread enough to warrant an acknowledgment from the project or team lead – someone who’s familiar enough with what’s going on to say something more substantial than “oops, we’re working on it”, but who isn’t too involved in the actual bug-hunting (because we want that to go faster).

Valiant.8016:

BDave.9386:

Kinda off-topic, but there are two things that I just can’t for the life of me figure out…
1) Why does MS still make non-embedded 32-bit versions of Windows?
2) Why did they fragment Windows into separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions in the first place?

Because some people still use older processors(Pentium) which can’t use 64-bit OS. It’s a shrinking minority, but it seems Microsoft still wants to cater to that minority. Pity Anet doesn’t have the same philosophy for Mac users.

According to wikipedia, the Pentium line got 64-bit support with the P4, back in 2004. If someone is still using a computer older than that… I don’t know, I find the distinction between 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows to be annoying.

Healix.5819:

If you’re using a 32-bit OS, you will have to upgrade.

Kinda off-topic, but there are two things that I just can’t for the life of me figure out…
1) Why does MS still make non-embedded 32-bit versions of Windows?
2) Why did they fragment Windows into separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions in the first place?

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Lews.8146:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Lews.8146:

Probably wait for the mac client for FFXIV online. it will be using middleware to apparently, but at least they said there going to be dedicated to constantly trying to improve the client and make it better, and they will have SUPPORT for it.

Uhhh… That’s an awful idea. Because… they already released their mac client back in July with Heavensward. It, like GW2, was powered by Cider. It was so so awful that they canned it and just offered everyone refunds. There was a whole lot of press about it. Was quite the screw up. When I say awful I mean just really really awful. At least GW2 is somewhat playable on OS X… Sort of.

Yes you are correct, but in yoshida’s statement following that event, he explained it all out, and then on top of the full refunds went on to further explain that they had then hired outside help (engineers and such specialized in mac), and that they would only re release it when it worked.

And that their mac client (yes a cider port) would be worked on continuously, receiving both normal updates, and middleware updates. So I’m just waiting to see how it will perform when they re release it, and ill decide from their, some cider ports can work very well. Not to mention he said they were going to work towards making use of the new “Metal” in mac, to make the clients performance difference hopefully close to none.

Unlike arena net they instantly took steps to make up for their mistake and to re assure the mac customer base, and to give them all the information on what they were planning to do very quickly.

Much better than what anet is doing.

Cider can’t make use of Metal.

Well, not the current version, anyway. Although with Nvidia buying them out, I’m not sure there’ll ever be a new version.

Incidentally, does anyone know why they did that? I mean what did they have that Nvidia was interested in?

Valiant.8016:

Wouldn’t a native client also mean, as a necessity, that they would have to develop parallel patches? One for the Windows client, and one for the Mac client?

Yes, but (there’s always a but) the amount of extra work involved heavily depends on how they structure their code, and how “deep” the changes in any given patch go.

John Carmack used to write Windows, OS X, and I think Linux versions of all ID’s engines, so it can be done (of course, it was easier for him to justify the effort since they were licensing out their engines).

WesleySnipes.3917:

Doing some research i was able to find something about cpu core unparking, although it was for windows pcs.
Does any1 know if there’s a way to do that on os x, and if so, is it harmful to the computer? does it improve gw2 fps?

I’ve not heard of OS X “parking” cores like that, although I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if it did, since Apple’s been all about the battery life lately.
There is a way to tell OS X to give higher priority to certain processes (the “renice” command, if you’re curious). I just tried it though and it didn’t make much, if any, difference.

Yngvi.3452:

Solution: Stop using cider start using the tools mac gives you for programming (free). You drop the code in run the debugger, figure out whats not working and hire a programmer who spent the week or two to learn SWIFT and fix the broken parts.

That’s kinda like telling someone to “Just hire someone who’s worked at Boeing for two weeks to strap a jet engine to your car and it’ll go faster”.

Swift is not a hard language to learn (as far as those things go), but, among other issues, there’s no way to automatically convert the code that’s already been written from whatever language they used (probably C++) to Swift. Even if there was such a tool, the OS APIs are different. In theory, you could write a “compatibility layer”, but somebody already did, and they called it “Cider”, so… yeah… probably not such a great idea if your whole premise is that Cider sucks. (Personally, I’d favor making a preprocessor that rewrites the source code to make it use the native APIs, because in addition to one less layer of function calls, you could look at the post-conversion code.)

So what they’d have to do is a ground-up rewrite, at least of certain parts. If they did a “proper” Model-View-Controller architecture, most of the Model layer could probably stay the same (or nearly the same, depending on where they put their file & network code), but they’d pretty much have to start over on the View and Controller parts. It’s not undoable, but we’re talking months (rather than weeks), if the programmer(s) already knows how the code works and all the shaders & such “just work”. If not, it could take over a year as the Art department figures out how to get all their stuff running in OS X.

In theory, if Anet wrote a client that did everything in DirectX 12, that might help make it easier to do a native OS X port, since DX12 and Metal are both lower-level APIs, and in theory that makes them more similar. I haven’t looked into how similar (or dissimilar) they are in practice, though.

Eagelseye.6312:

Hello Fellow Players;

After going through several threads and have couple of reverts from the Technical team over a OOM Crash ticket, there are a few things that comes up:

1. The game is now almost unplayable at 32-bit system and the players need to upgrade to a 64-bit system if they wish to continue playing as the new patches won’t let users play smoothly in a 32-bit system

Cider is only 32-bit, so us Mac users can’t really do much about this one.