Force full download?

I have a laptop that is pretty decent, except when it comes to downloading content for an outpost/town I haven't been to before on that machine. Anyway, I was wondering if there was a way to basically have it download all of the town/outpost/other data ahead of time, so once I do get to a new place, it's ready for me.

Basically, if I've been to a town already, then loading into it is quick, but if I haven't been there yet, it takes a while to load it...

Right click on the GW icon and go to properties. In the command line after everything else, add a space and type in -image. This forces the client to download all the data ahead of time. The only thing is it won't actually launch the game for you. Either take off the -image when you're done or copy+paste the shortcut and add the -image to that icon's command line.

Excellent! TYVM.

I prefer to go to run and do "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\gw.exe" -image. This way, any time I want to do it all I've got to do is hit Windows+R buttons and Enter. Anyway, it's my preferred way.

someone jsut told me about this 2 days ago if i woulda knows this 2 yrs ago .............

glad to have known it now

FYI, the thread about all the available command line switches is here:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=94814

The complete download if you have all three chapters is about 3GB, så don't do this if you're on dial up.

It doesn't matter whether you have a certain campaign or not. You still download all the files for all the campaigns. And if you run on dial-up, this is something to do overnight.

I gots a GW image icon on my desktop, I run it before I load the game every time. Does that make me 'troubled'?

Who called you troubled? I do the same thing.

Luckily for anyone who needs to know i had to reformat yesterday and i left my guild wars downloading with the -image command last night so currently starting from scratch with the -image command the guild wars .dat file is 3.54GB

I do that every time i know there is an update

It takes me an hour to download the full -image pack, and I have a 100MBit connection - why on earth do you guys use the -image thing every time you run the game? That's just... well, silly. The game engine is made to be patched on the run, there's no need to ever do the -image thing except to avoid downloads when entering a new area, or if you've got a bad HD and some files have become corrupted.

By the way, for a dial-upper with a 64K connection, that's not an "overnight download", that's a solid four days worth of blocking the phone, downloading.
If you have lower-end broadband, say a 2MBit, then it's a good over-nighter.

Partly for the reason I bolded in your post.

But also, when there is a new update, not all the files are downloaded at once depending on its size or how many areas the download affects. If it doesn't d/l it all when you first log on then it streams it.

That takes away bandwidth for playing the game. Not much of course, but I have a cable connection to the net, so it just seems to make sense to avoid that and get it all in one go.

I do it before I start up the game because you never know when a bug fix is going to happen. Updates usually get rolled out on Thursdays, but even those are sometimes put out on days other than that. It takes about 5 seconds for my -image shortcut to check, if that, so no real harm done.

:shrugs: