Linux Version?

Is there a LINUX version of Guild Wars for the betas and will there be a linux version for the full release? I really hope there will be...

no plans yet for anything but windows

At guildwars.com they said they have no plans for a Linux version. But they may make one in the future. I'm guessing that's about a 25% chance.

I wonder if anyone's tried it under wine?

Currently there just isn't a large enough linux market to make it really worth the effort to convert games to linux. It would cost more to make the game into a linux client than it would be recouped in sales.

I'm actually surprised NwN did the linux client thing. I thought it was a nice move. I don't know how much it actually helped or hurt their bottom line though.

I've heard that some people have tried it with Wine unsuccesfully. Thats why I was looking for a full out linux version.

And then there's the Mac market to consider.

(Although it's been my experience that purchasing a non-Windows machine kinda is a forfeiture of gaming on it.)
-- Scaper-X

someday i will be able to play all my games on Linux until then my Linux computer is made from all the parts i swap out of my 'toy' read game machine running windows.

I wish it will be on mac's, then I can use my G5 with 9600 XT ( compared to my Windows 9200 ) and 20 inch/LCD 19 CRT combo.

Macintosh....*shudders* I'm sorry, but buying a Mac seems to be a waste of money. Might be nice for photo editing and similiar subjects, but anything other than that and you might as well just mail them money and not even get your machine.

If you can't tell, I hate Macintosh with a passion

While I, too, have a strong distaste for Macintosh computers, they're positively vital for editing.

Which is a shame considering my desired profession, seeing as they seem to not like me equally.

EDIT: Why not add this classic video on the love of Macs.

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~zachie/mac.wmv

"I like the handle here. That's so you can attach a chain and use it as a BOAT ANCHOR!"
-- Scaper-X

While we're bashing on Macintosh...

http://www.electric-chicken.co.uk/

Not as good as the video, but you get the point.

Just get an emulator. People have been having success with HL2 running on emulators on Linux.

Yeah, Macintosh's just need to die. They pollute the cyber universe with their wannabe elitist marketing but then it becomes apparent that they all crash and burn so really all their exclusiveness just turns into absolute exclusiveness because no one can run the &^@)(&(*$^ MacOS; not even them.

I also feel so terrible for our honorary guild mate Waldemar (you'll have to ask Orange about his forum posts ) because his household is infested with Macware so nothing works! He's freaking obsessed with this game but he has no system to support it. Also, his ipod broke after about six months and that's just freaking ridiculous; there is just no legitimate excuse for that.

Transgaming.com WineX/Cedega have GuildWars listed as supported I believe. But haven't tried it out yet ofcourse Good chance it will run, anyway, but WineX is not free.

The Q&A had this to say.....

There is a CVS version of WineX/Cedega that is free, but a bit more limited and complicated to set up and run. You can, however, turn to warez copies of it. (Yes, they are out there)

Anyway, apparently it does run, as the screenshots on this page show:
http://transgaming.org/gamesdb/games...l?game_id=3370

Both of them were taken on March 18th, 2005. That is, last beta IIRC.

This same page links to this wiki:
http://digital-conquest.ath.cx/wiki/...php/Guild_Wars

There it is reported that it runs with problems. Some quite serious as not updating. It was, however, last updated on February 26th. Thing could have changed. (Actually, the screenshots were under Cedega 4.3 and the wiki page only reports testing with Cedega 4.1.1)

Most of you probably already read all this, but anyway, at least they're direct links for those who haven't searched too deep yet.

We could try it out next beta (or convince an alpha to do it for us), or mail the screenshots' author to see if we get any detailed info on how it worked. I'd love to know, but I'm too lazy to get my linux set up right now.

BTW, loved the Mac movie...

I'll just revive this thread - it's not really that old... :-)

If Guild Wars won't work with Cedega (I doubt it, just checked the official forums - it works with Cedega 4.3.1, but misses textures and stuff), you might want to bribe Oliver Stieber...

He's currently working on Wine (the real, open-source one), and he's really successful with DirectX stuff - he might be able to make Guild Wars work. As soon as his Amazon wishlist is up again, I might buy him a copy of Guild Wars if he's interested in working on it (if I like it, that is - if I don't, I'll post a link for others to bribe Oliver... :-) ). My father intends to buy a copy tomorrow, if we're lucky it'll already work (official Wine tree + Olivers patches).

I'll let you know!

PS: I would still prefer an official client, but I don't hold my breath...!

You know, I am of the belief that I would love GuildWars.. The only thing is that I am running Linux.. Although I can use it with Wine, it didn't run that good because I have to use DirectX emulation..

So, it would be great to have at least OpenGL support or better, a client for Mac OS and Linux available then..

This thread is nearly two years old!

That's as maybe, but with a couple of patches, GW can run on Wine 0.9.28 pretty darn well. It needs the lighting patch and the 32 bit mouse one. All the details can be found on the winehq.com page for GW here: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=6551

/sarcasm on Get a PROPER OS and then you play GW /sarcasm off

Wow this thread is really old... Can't linux do anything you want it to? I dont have much know how about how to use Linux but thats what ive heard.

well, reading this thread inspired me to try and install gw on the linux partition of my laptop (kubuntu 6.10) with wine (i don't want to pay for cedega, so i don't know how well it would work) and it worked, sort of.

I could install gw from the cd, and run it, with a few major problems:

the graphics were pretty bad (probably a directx problem ), but the cursor did show up for me w/o the 32-bit mouse patch, although it doesn't for most people. one of the more major problems was the fact that when mouse-looking, i could only rotate the screen to the left, and up. so i'd get stuck lookin straight up after a few tries, and having to rotate in almost a complete circle to the left to turn to the right a little -or use the arrow keys- then end up restarting gw.

all in all, gw is unplayable (at least without much tinkering, which i don't want to do) in wine, so i will stick to using good old ( ) windoze for my gaming and linux for anything that i don't want to crash on me

^lol

Thread is old, some totally pointless trolling in it.

If you want to drag up old topics, please pick something intresting


Closed

cannonfodder

Ok I reopened the thread after a PM from the guy/gal who reactivated this old thread.

Now you can discuss away on this matter.

I'd like to also throw a question in too.

As it says on the box Guildwars is only made for a windows platform, so is getting or trying to get it to run on any linux distro's breaking the EULA, in my opinion I think it is

Discuss

cannonfodder

What's the harm done..? =S

bill gates will curse you for not using windows
the main problem I see coming is that there is not enough people concerned by this

I think your best bet would be to run windows in VMware under linux, if your computer is fast enough for that. It's illegal I think (not sure) but it works.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with all US laws on this subject, it's my opinion and nothing more.
Perhaps someone from NC Interactive could tell something more.

Let's look at the User Agreement.
Most interesting part is: 7. OFFICIAL SERVICE
The only part running GW on Linux could offend is the first line and some part later on:
"The Game(s) is designed for official play only as offered through the Service by NC Interactive at the Web Site and not through any other means.
....
except that you may use the Software to the extent expressly permitted by this Agreement. "

This is covered in 2. DESCRIPTION OF SERVICE
As I read the UA, you must use the official client, you may not use hard or software that provides advantage or influences the gameplay.

Running GW on Linux with a (not altered) official client and no software that breaks the UA seems not (explicitly) prohibited.
The same goes for running within VMware or Mac OS.

Now to the question why there is no Linux / Mac / OtherOS version of Guild Wars.
The first reason I can think of is that the market for GW is about 99% Windows. Almost all new computers are shipped with some kind of Microsoft Windows OS. There is a small niche where computers are shipped with an alternative OS, but that's on explicit request of the buyer.

The second reason is the choices made in game development.
GW uses DirectX, which is a 'Microsoft solution'. That limits the game to Microsoft Windows and emulators with DirectX support.
When looking at more 'open' solutions, the development team could use OpenGL as graphics engine, but should look for other solutions when it comes to sound, input control and perhaps network.

I'm not sure if NC Interactive should provide a Linux / Mac client.
It's a lot of effort for a very small market.
I do understand that there are people that only use Linux or Mac, but most of the time that choice was made after consideration of the advantages and disadvantages.
And one of the disadvantages is that you are not able to run GW (or not as well as on Windows).

If you have Linux, play Tux Racer.

For everything else, there's windows or consoles. Same goes for Mac.

In Linux there's not only the hassle of no DirectX, even getting good drivers (all game required supped up features supported) is a chore for anything but some more popular ones.

OpenGL is not popular, since it's less supported under windows. And game developers typically aim for latest greatest. Even then, driver vendors must regularly patch their drivers to fix problems in their drivers exposed by games.

Linux and Mac market are worthless. Yes, some game support them. But that is only as a convenience, not as a marketing move.

Consider this. If you plan on selling 50 million copies, the Mac/Linux might come out at 1-3%, resulting in 500k-1.5 mil copies for those clients. That's reasonable.

But what about same ratio when you only intend to sell 1 million? 10,000 to 30,000 copies. Nope. It doesn't even remotely cover the development costs.

Also, with DX10, the complete design of graphics engines will change, offering insane features and power. Why bother staying with obsolete API when you have a solution here and now. Not to mention, that if you stick with DX, porting to xbox is much simpler. Supporting API for some niche market simply isn't viable in such overcrowded market as games.

1. OpenGL is only a graphic API.
2. With OpenGL it's possible to have all that great DX10 graphic features even on Windows XP
3. OpenGL is as supported in Windows as Direct3D.
4. Vista/DX10 dropps support for hardware sound accerlation, more game developers will use OpenAL in the future.

Edit:
Concerning GuildWars with Linux:

The only thing I can think of that would tip-toe with the EULA is the fact that you need to use Wine or Cedega to run GW in linux:

$ wine Gw.dat

which would probably be considered a "third party tool", although it wouldn't "in any way influence or advantage your use of the Service".

The only problem with that^ is that the person is using Cedega, which you have to pay for ($5/month, minimum 3 month subscription, and then you don't get any more updates after your three months), and it is much harder to run it in Wine, the free version of that kind of software, which has relatively poor game support because it's meant more for stuff like MS Word.

Ok, then a screen with wine and Guild Wars:

Just doesn't look as good as the cedega screen, and wine needs some minor patches atm.

But the wine's direct3d support is getting better every version, and in a year or two wine's game support will be better then cedega's.
The Problem of cedega is that it is an gigantic "hack" to get this and this game running, wine tries to implent Direct X as a whole.

And there are at least a few games that run on wine, but not on cedega.

I think Aspyr goes to companies and pays them for the right to port their game to Mac. And they're still in business.

Actually OpenGL allows you to take advantage of all the features of the 8800 today. In regular Windows XP or GNU/Linux. You can not do that in D3D, you need to wait for Vista and then buy a whole new OS that can support DX10, and nVidia to release DX10 drivers...

Not true for DX10. DX10 is significantly different from DX9 (API on the 360). In fact it would be easier to port an existing DX9 game to OpenGL than to DX10.

Nintendo has used an API since the N64 which is basically OpenGL. All mobile phone games use OpenGL. Japanese game companies like Konami use (used? Do they still make games?) OpenGL in their arcade boards. The Playstation3 supports OpenGL. Apple uses OpenGL. linux, bsd, solaris and all other unix workstations are OpenGL.

OpenGL is quite good, even in WindowsXP.

The differences in DX10 and DX9 are big enough that all future games will need a rendering abstraction layer to support the two of them, which will make it easy to add OpenGL support. Combined with linux's slowly growing market consumer market share and Apple's quickly growing market share (probably double what you guessed!) things are looking not too bad for the alternative systems in the near term, especially with OpenAL to cover the audio. It's the other things like licensing a DiVX codec, a physics engine, etc that make supporting systems other than Windows difficult.

If I were a linux gamer I'd definitely spend $5 to support Cedega, you spend much more on the games themselves and you would've spent a couple years of subscription fees on a Windows license.