Guild Wars on Ubuntu with Wine
When I switched to Ubuntu, all of my Windows-only games were forgotten. But a few days ago I decided to try to run Guild Wars with Wine. I downloaded the GW client installer off the website and the install went ok. But when I ran the game the log-on screen looked wierd, there was no cursor, and it crashed Ubuntu.
Today I tried again after Wine updated to 0.9.34, which fixes the cursor issue. After tweaking some settings, Guild Wars is playable!
- Make sure you are running the latest version of Wine
- Make sure XGL is not running, it slows down the game.
- Install Guild Wars with the installer from the website.
- Change these settings in winecfg
These are the settings that worked best for me, on my computer. I have a ATI Radeon X300 graphics card with the fglrx driver.
- Windows version: Windows XP
- Emulate a virtual desktop
- Vertex shader support: Hardware
- Allow pixel shader
- ALSA audio driver
- Audio hardware acceleration: Full
To improve performance, run Wine’s regedit program and add these strings to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D.
- “DirectDrawRenderer”=“opengl”
- “OffscreenRenderingMode”=“backbuffer”
- “opengl”=“enabled”
- “RenderTargetLockMode”=“auto
- “UseGLSL”=“disabled”
- “VideoMemorySize”=“256”
UseGLSL enabled did not work for me, if it works enabled for you leave it on. If you have lots of RAM change VideoMemorySize to 512.
With these settings I get 25-30 fps at 1024x768 with lowest quality graphics. The game works flawlessly except for two things. All battle sounds do not work, which is odd because all other sounds are fine. The second issue is the cursor takes a few seconds to appear when entering a new area.
Time to go try some more Windows games in Wine.
Archived Comments
Anonymous
Same here, it was running fine before, but FPS were very low and responsiveness just wasn’t there. Now there are just a few hicups now and then, getting around 30 fps (vs about 45 on Windows) and it’s totally playable.
Anonymous
With the newest version of wine (1.1.5) and Ubuntu 8.04 I am receiving errors. I’m using the fglrx driver which is apparently causing the game to crash. (Look at WineHQ) Please update this article with a fix for this problem when one comes around. As for now I’m stuck because the only way to work around this, from what I understand, is to compile wine from source and edit out two lines. I’m a noob and this is a little to much for me.
Westley
THANKS!!! Guild wars was running choppy even it was 70 fps.
This registry “UseGLSL”=”disabled” works and now the game runs very smooth :D
Rob Ross
This did not work for me at all, just like all the other advice I’ve taken thus far. I just want to give up on this.
Anonymous
Tried this out on ubuntu 8.04, amazing it worked and i’m playin good by windows!