Guild Wars 2

Thanks, I guess I feel like all my work was already done before posting here and there’s no pain for me ahead in just letting people know and hopefully help anet improve the situation, especially since they recommended I post here. I enjoy tinkering with things and debugging them, I wasn’t really looking for any kind of help other than hopefully raising an itch with an anet dev who could do something about the problem. It seemed condescending to me to reply to a post that says “here’s a solution to a problem” with “don’t bother/change the situation so you won’t need the solution”. I hope that helps explain. Anyway, <3

I’ve been using a case sensitive file system exclusively since 2004, so far I’ve yet to come across an unfixable issue (sometimes needed to rely on disk images or a couple of symlinks). I’ve filed bugs everywhere, sometimes resulting in a fix, sometimes not. I really don’t see where the hostility is coming from.

I honestly don’t understand why you’re so dismissive about this, I need to use a case sensitive file system for work and it’s a supported configuration according to Apple. Note that iPhones etc use case sensitive file systems for everything, and they might even soon be coming to the Mac – the new file system doesn’t even support case insensitive file systems yet. If only the installer were fixed, installing to a case insensitive disk image would be trivially accomplished by anyone.

I sent the following bug report and was encouraged to post to the forums, I hope this is the right place:

Installation on Mac OS fails when case sensitive file system is used (including solution)

The Guild Wars II installer fails without an error message when it is used on a system that has a case sensitive file system. using dtrace to see specifically which incorrect file access is causing the bug, I noticed that there’s a misspelled plugin path that’s tried to be accessed by the installer. When the installer creates a directory inside /tmp with the installation files, it creates the directory /tmp/<NUMBER>/Guild\ Wars\ 2\ Installer.app/Contents/Plugins. It then tries to access the directory /tmp/<NUMBER>/Guild\ Wars\ 2\ Installer.app/Contents/PlugIns. Note the difference between Plugins and PlugIns.

I have since discovered a simple solution that fixes this issue and allows me to play on a Mac with a case-sensitive file system. First off, you need to use Disk Utility to clone the Gw2Setup.dmg to make it writable. Mount Gw2Setup.dmg, then open Disk Utility (it’s in Applications/Utilities). Make sure the Guild Wars 2 image is selected in Disk Utility, then use File -> New Image -> Image from Guild Wars 2. Pick a name, choose “read/write” as the disk image format, and save. Dismount the Guild Wars 2 installer and open the new image you just created. Right-click on the “Guild Wars 2 Installer.app” and choose “Show Package Contents”. In the Contents folder, rename Plugins to PlugIns. Then, execute the Guild Wars 2 Installer.app. It should load normally.

To actually install the game, you need to use a case insensitive disk image afaik. Head back to Disk Utility, create a new sparse disk image of appropriate size (roughly 40GB should be OK currently), then select that image to install to in the guild wars installer. In detail: In Disk Utility, File -> New Image ->Blank Image. pick a name, set size to 40 GB, set Image Format to sparse disk image. Then save and mount the newly created disk image. It should show up in the installer as an installation destination.