Copying Guild Wars from one machine to the next

Hey ya'll,

Just a bit of a setback sort of issue. For a bit of a background, I'm currently employed at a gaming center. There's only one fully updated copy of Guild Wars, the rest require a massive sum of files to download.

I'm trying to figure out how to copy Guild Wars from one PC to another. The problem is even though I copy the fully updated version of GW from this machine, the pasted version still has a couple thousand downloads.

Any suggestions? Ideas on where the rest of the files are downloaded? Anything's appreciated!

-Bryant

All you need is gw.exe (very small) and gw.dat (very, very large - about 3.6GB)

I would firstly check to make absolutelt sure you have everything downloaded. You would do this be editing the Guild Wars shortcut to add -image after the shortcut link.

After that, take the gw.dat and gw.exe and burn to a DVD. Take the exe and run on the machines you wish, you will need to let the gw.exe download some stuff, then it will ask you for the install location then do a bit more downloads. Then the download screen will show a huge bar that barely starts to fill up, and it is there that I stop the download, locate the Guild Wars folder in your Program Files (assuming you used the default download location) and copy the gw.dat file from the DVD over top the small gw.dat file already in the folder and you should be good to go from there.

Make sure you use -image on your first copy before you copy the .dat file to all other machines.

ie.
C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\gw.exe -image

(just change folder/drive if needed)

Also, make sure you change GW to use 1024x768 with no antialiasing before you copy GW.dat. If you run it in high resolution (or with AA enabled) and then copy to a machine that doesn't support that resolution or AA level, you will not be able to permanently save the video settings (though you can change them within the game - it just won't use them next time you run).

Just move you're gw.dat file over to your new computer. It's really big, so if you got a portable hard drive use that (which is what I did).

That isn't all you need.

You will need to make a gw.reg file in order for your game to update your gw.dat file whenever there is an update. Here is an example:

My GW is installed on my E drive, that is why it says E. Change the location appropriately -- the double \'s are very important. Once you do that, save it in notepad as something.reg and run it. The above is only good for Windows XP. I believe the Vista/w7 ones are at different locations.

Also don't forget your templates folder needs to be moved to your new machine also.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER, I believe.

What exactly does that do, by the way? I've been running GW on this box for over a year without any "proper" installation. Just running gw.exe for the first time seems to hook into the registry quite nicely.

I've copied my GW install onto at least 4 different computers, without a problem... just put it on a flash drive and copy away... works for me

The registry defines where the program looks to find files. So, if it's wrong, the game won't update correctly.

For example, if it's set to:

"C:\\Program Files\\Guild Wars\\Gw.exe"
But you have GW installed to...
"E:\Games\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"
etc.

Then, there will be updating problems.

When you run Gw.exe it looks in your registry to find its location, if that process is already running (the exact path), then it will terminate. Thus, if you make a reg to change the registry path to your second GW folder for example, this is what enables you to run two instances of GW on the same machine simultaneously. If you do not change the registry path, the Gw.exe will look at the path set in registry and your GW will just swap back to the one already running, as it's set to do that. I believe first it checks the program name, which is why you have to hex edit "Guild Wars" to "Guild Warz" or similar when you're manually loading 2 clients.

At least, this is my understanding.

It might help a bit to better explain how I'm copying them.

Many of our games are ran off of a server which all the computers are connected to. Some run fine, some don't, and Guild Wars is one of the ones that runs horribly. So what I did originally was installed a local copy of GW on one of our machines, copy it to the server, and proceed to copy it to one of the other machines from there.

But even though both .dat files were the same size, it still had to download ten's of thousands of files.

That might be it, though, copying it to and then from the shared server? I have a spare big-ass flashdrive that I'll try next time I'm in. Thanks guys!

if you run the disk that came with til after you see the c:guild wars path name it inserts the registry key then close it and copy and paste no problem. done it a millions time without much a problem.

The game automatically amends the registry when you run it for the first time.