Guild Wars 2

I kind of have quit the game but I played a little bit to celebrate and test out the native client. It looks really good and is super stable, very good work. Here’s my feedback on a few areas that can hopefully be improved:

• When windowed on Sierra the application title bar is dark gray, because the application content is black (opengl view). You can make it look like a normal window by adding `[windowPointer setBackgroundColor:[NSColor whiteColor]]` and filling the contentView with black

• The performance is not that great, hopefully this can be improved a little. I am running GW on a i7-3770 @ 3.40GHz and GeForce GTX 680MX with 2GB of VRAM. The game is CPU bound, as changing graphical settings doesn’t really change FPS that much or at all. It’s pretty cool to enjoy the game supersampled though

• Performance when I first tried the game was super bad when turning the camera (~10fps), this is no longer the case even after game restarts. It leaves a really bad first impression though

• I have not experienced any of the loading performance problems other have mentioned, I am running SSD (not hybrid)

I just got a PS4 Pro instead, no gaming on Mac anymore. Also improved my RSI!

LS Episode4 is coming out soon, so hopefully we can get status update in the AMA!

Maybe my dream of alpha for Xmas could happen!!! Ok, most likely not… but maybe!!!

New update from the reddit AMA:

We were waiting for this question
I have had characters running around in game! We are to the point where we’re fixing specific bugs instead of the big general ones. We’ve still got not release date but significant progress is being made!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/53plre/rising_flames_devs_here_ask_us_anything/d7v5eho

ananda.5946:

How are you guys still selling the Mac version? You know it barely functions and you know you can’t fix any of the many critical issues.

https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/28147936-Guild-Wars-2-Mac-Edition

I appreciate the position you were in with Transgaming, but that situation occurred a long time ago now and, with no solution in place for over a year, it is not honest to continue advertising GW2 as working in OS X. It’s not like people who are deceived by this won’t notice. You could change the Mac support page to suggest Bootcamp for now with the hope of a native client potentially being released at some unknown future date. But, to keep up a description of a Mac beta client that isn’t even supported anymore is highly dishonest and not the way to endear the company to OS X users.

I am curious; is this native client effort a serious one with a dedicated team or a sort of side project when people aren’t busy doing other things? I am so sick of using Windows. It truly is a terrible OS as compared to OS X. And, I really, really miss my magic trackpad functionality.

From what I can tell it’s probably 2-3 devs working on it, maybe more but not full time (who the hell can work fulltime uninterrupted on a project for months anyway? businesses do not work like that).

Anyway it will get released someday! Good software takes time and should be released only when it’s ready. ArenaNet is still one of the few companies that works like that (for the most part).

Porting a game as big as GW2 must be not trivial. Its not just OpenGL. You also have to port audio code. OpenAL is kind of kitten and outdated on OSX, so CoreAudio is the way to go so you must write your own downmixing code for positional sound effects) and several other pieces: threading code since windows doesn’t use pthreads, network code, stuff that uses pipes, window management and opengl context creation to name a few. You also need to setup tooling such as buildbots, CI & automated testing, automated releases…

It’s normal that it will take months… I’d be happy to have the client by xmas, but I know it’s probably too short of a timeframe.

I did try wine-staging 64-bit too, but it’s way slower than official client even with CSMT enabled. I’ll keep playing on the official client until native one is finished.

Did you do any other tuning aside from enabling CSMT?

That’s amazing news. It looks like the hardest part of the work is done – so it’s not anymore a matter of if we will get a native client, but a matter of when.

HippieJoel.9537:

For this reason, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the native OS X client never gets released, simply because ArenaNet might find themselves unable to meet people’s expectations. Obviously I hope that doesn’t happen – I’d be over the moon to have a native OS X client but I wouldn’t rule out that happening. On the other hand, a native OS X client (and one that’s running off the same codebase as the Windows one) would still be better than anything TransGaming can offer.

It’s not about performance that they are fixing with the native client, it’s the crashes. Of course the performance will benefit quite a bit from it, but not by a huge amount (my wild guess would be around 10-20% fps, which still is nice).

To really then game properly one has to install nVidia web drivers: they use the same driver binary blob used on windows/linux but on OS X. Sadly I have an old 680MX – and the webdrivers support only cards in the 7xx series and above.

HippieJoel.9537:

Disclaimer: Apple’s direction on hardware doesn’t really affect me as I use a hackintosh.

No I am actually worried about software.

Hackintosh does look great, I will probably get one, when I have to change my desktop next year. Looking forward to build some nice MicroATX config.

HippieJoel.9537:

I feel like it’s worth me saying, I genuinely love this game. I’ve been playing on and off since launch (despite being the most casual player in the universe) and I honestly can’t wait for the day that I can play this game on natively on my platform of choice.

Well, I’ve been playing Guild Wars 1/2 on and off since 2004! So I am quite a fan as well. Until HoT I used to run Dungeons and Fractals in highly organized parties (those maps are simple and don’t crash as well!), but alas – dungeons are dead and the reward structure of fotm is meh compared to old level 50. But I digress…

Apple direction is quite worrying, but I need a unix system to do my programming on that is not a disgrace to use. I’ve used Linux for years before OSX and god knows I don’t wanna go back.

Windows is not an option, even with GNU/kWindows

wcpemm.1497:

For more adventurous/advanced users, for the last few days I have been using wine-staging to play the game, as detailed here. If you’re familiar with the terminal/wine it’s well worth a shot. My launcher now loads instantly.

I wrote that reddit post. Since then I just reverted to the official client. wine-staging does appear to crash a little less. Maybe that’s placebo though.

I am now playing only PvP (those maps are very simple and don’t crash!) and other games. Just waiting for the native client so I can finally enjoy HoT maps , I will also avoid living world until then. Hopefully before xmas

HippieJoel.9537:

What they could do is build an updated game client which could be more easily ported and release it alongside a future expansion (maybe even have DirectX 11 support on Windows!) but now we’re just dreaming.

I’d like to think that a decent part of their market are Mac users but unfortunately I do get the impression that that’s not really the case.

Well, even before even going the togl route, they could start by managing the memory a little better. For example I’ve read that many games always allocate big chunks of space and then fill that with textures/models/etc (this way they can defragment it).

Anyway, I will probably switch back to Linux sooner or later and enjoy the 64bit client on Wine-Staging

HippieJoel.9537:

Don’t expect a working Mac client any time soon unless ArenaNet decide to rewrite the game engine, something I can’t see them finding money in the budget to do.

Great post, everything is correct.

Actually it would be possible to have a native client that uses only a togl layer like Valve’s Vogl, or eON (which I believe offers consulting to companies that want their games ported).

It would be still quite costly (especially to maintain and QA), but nowhere near as rewriting the engine. This is supposing the main loop, network code and audio code are well factored so that the windows specifics are well isolated.

I’m waiting for LLVM 3.8, since it will ship some features that allow to compile the 64bit wine-staging version on OSX. Maybe we are lucky and GW2 doesn’t end up using the incompatible register (some applications don’t).

I play GW since 2005 and I stopped GW2 2 weeks ago because of the crashes. It’s the best solution. I still come to bump the thread though, you guys should do the same

I will play some GW1. That works perfectly well through Wine, and looks better than GW2 on lowest settings to prevent the crashes.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Inazuma.6107:

SpookyElectric.1507:

I’m about to try a Wineskin of the Windows 64-bit client, bypassing the Mac client completely. If this works and my crashes go away, I will report back here.

Wine doesn’t support 64bit on OSX. See my earlier post in this thread.

To my knowledge Wine can run 64 bit applications on OS X… They’re generally not supported by the community because they’re harder to get to work properly, but they can run.

Oh, apparently you can build Wine64 on OSX from git. Wine-Staging is broken on OSX though and you want it for CSMT and other stuff for decent performance.

SpookyElectric.1507:

I’m about to try a Wineskin of the Windows 64-bit client, bypassing the Mac client completely. If this works and my crashes go away, I will report back here.

Wine doesn’t support 64bit on OSX. See my earlier post in this thread.

The launcher not showing up might be fontconfig rebuilding it’s cache. Other multi platform software suffers from it (if you used VLC you know what I’m talking about). Just give it 5-10 minutes

If this is indeed the problem they could ‘solve’ it by providing a custom fonts.conf for fontconfig: the fix is trivial.

OrganicAtom.2860:

Heap, bytes=4194752
A serious error has occurred that prevented the application from continuing. A report has been sent to ArenaNet to help determine the cause.

Is that even true? Are you really determining the cause?

The cause is well known but there is really no easy solution.

The Cider wrapper to GW2 behaves like a 32bit Windows so GW2 suffers really fast from memory fragmentation. It’s possible to avoid heap fragmentation but it requires A LOT of programming resources (developer time) either by allocating on the stack, or allocating fixed sized chunks of memory on the heap. An easier way out is using a 64bit application in a 64bit OS since in that scenario an application can address and allocate a lot more memory . ArenaNet currently used this way out to solve the problem for the Windows users.

Unfortunately, the 64bit version will never be able to run on OSX through Cider/Wine. Wine’s 64bit version is not compatible with OSX. This is caused by the fact that on OSX a particular cpu register is used by the OS that on Linux and Windows the applications are free to use. So you would have to use a CPU emulator making things extra slow. The are a lot of details about this on the Wine mailing lists. This incompatibility could be avoided by applications not using this register at all, but it’s still unclear and it will probably take about 2 years of development time until there is usable Wine64 on OSX (even for Wine people this is not a priority).

Also keep in mind that Cider as we know it is no longer developed. Transgaming sold the technology and the team to NVIDIA, which is using both for work on NVIDIA SHIELD.

Wine and by extension Cider have no 64 bit support on OSX. From the Wine mailing list:

“I don’t know the exact details myself (Ken is the expert), but the answer is that it does not work, and probably never will. OSX has a ABI incompatibility with Win64 – OSX overwrites a CPU register that Win64 applications expect to remain untouched. Apple can’t change the ABI because there are already 64 bit OSX apps that expect things to work that way. A potential workaround may be to run Wine inside a CPU emulator like qemu, but that is anything but easy.”

So it will be impossibile to run a 64bit version of Guild Wars 2 on OSX for many years to come (and when it will be possible it will be slow because it will be emulated). I am considering to switch to Linux (where wine has proper 64 bit support) or Windows,so that I don’t crash anymore.

Hey Joel, thank you for the great work! And thanks for working on your free time to bring us this. I’m pretty sure I will use this camera mode, since I’m one those guys constantly pressing the right mouse button

I have some questions:

- Would be possible to activate instant ground targeting only for the granades/mortar kit auto attack, and leave “Fast with Range Indicator” or “Normal” for all the other skills? I would like to keep a visual confirmation for all the other important skills (since they have generally a longer recharge).

- Does the engineer instant autoattack work even with pressing the “Weapon Skill 1” binding? I currently have that bound to spacebar from guild wars 1 tradition (c and tab too!).

No a question but hopefully in the future we will be able to rebind the mouse buttons to something else. From what you mentioned it looks it will need a lot of refactoring!

Proposal Overview
Add the location of the Guildies in the Guild Roster

Goal of Proposal
This way I can see what my Guildies are up to, if they are in an instance on a different server than mine I now just see their server and not the current location

Proposal Functionality
Replace “Server Name” with “Location [Server Name]” in the Guild Roster so that it works like the Friendlist

Associated Risks
None

Proposal Overview
Add Alliances

Goal of Proposal
I can can interact with more quality players than the ones in my guild

Proposal Functionality
– Allow one Guild to form an alliance
– Allow to invite other Guilds to the Alliance
– Add an alliance chat
– Done

- [OPTIONAL] Allow to partecipate in Guild Missions of an allied Guild, without requiring an invite to their roster.
– I don’t propose to add anything like cities control as in GW1 on a first iteration

Associated Risks
People will PUG less