- Part 0: About This Guide
- Part 1: About Environment Variables and Bash Scripts
- Part 2: Setting Up 32-Bit Support
- Part 3: Choosing a Wine Version
- Part 4: Basic Guild Wars Installation
- Part 5: DXVK
- Part 6: ESYNC/FSYNC/NTSYNC
- Part 7: TexMod/uMod/gMod
- Part 8: DirectSong
- Part 9: DSOAL-GW1
- Part 10: Toolbox
- Part 11: Chat Filter
- Part 12: 4K UI Fixes
- Part 13: paw*ned2
- Part 14: Multiboxing
- Part 15: Solving Steam Headaches
This is a guide for installing Guild Wars on Linux. It covers both the "bare bones" basic installation, and the "full bells and whistles" installation, and everything in between.
A consistent principle of this guide is that you are going to do everything manually on the command line. This way you will know exactly what you did in case you want to make changes later, and, if something goes wrong, you will know exactly where, and probably have a useful error message. This is in contrast to tools like Lutris that promise to set up Guild Wars for you, but are opaque about what they did, or what went wrong.
Unlike my previous guide on reddit, this guide resides on github. There are a few reasons for this: I'm hoping that github will make it easier to edit this document to keep it up to date, and also for others to contribute. I'm able to include the files for "extras" like uMod right here in the repo. I don't want to give reddit monetizeable content anymore.
Wine depends on environment variables to set important parameters.
The WINEPREFIX environment variable tells wine which prefix to use. You must specify this every time you want to interact with the wine prefix you will be creating for Guild Wars.
The WINEARCH environment variable tells wine what Windows architecture to simulate when first setting up a wine prefix. In the past, you needed a 32-bit wine prefix for Guild Wars if you wanted to set up DirectSong. That is no longer the case. Currently, it is advised to use a 64-bit wine prefix for forward compatibility with the "new wow64 mode" (see Part 2). To set up a 64-bit prefix, either leave WINEARCH unset when first creating the wine prefix, or set it to win64. (On wine >= 10.2, wow64 will also create a 64-bit prefix.)
For wine >= 10.2, the WINEARCH environment variable is also used to tell wine to activate the "new wow64 mode" (see Part 2). To use the "new wow64 mode," you must specify WINARCH=wow64 every time.
This guide presents environment variables in a mix-and-match style. For one-off commands, environment variables are presented as part of the command, like so: WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw some-command. For a series of commands that will be executed in the same console window, environment variables are presented as export statements that set an environment variable for the lifetime of the console window, like so: export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw. Unless context suggests otherwise, you should generally assume that all the instructions in a given part of this guide take place in the same console window, using the same exports.
After Guild Wars is fully set up, you will want to make a bash script to set all your environment variables and reduce everything to one click, then modify your Guild Wars desktop file to invoke your script.
Example script: start uMod and Guild Wars, then inject Toolbox (using "new wow64 mode" for 32-bit support, ESYNC, and dll hook for uMod):
#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw
export WINEARCH=wow64
export WINEDEBUG=-all
export WINEESYNC=1
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\uMod" "C:\Program Files (x86)\uMod\uMod.exe" &
sleep 1
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" &
sleep 1
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\GWToolbox" "C:\Program Files (x86)\GWToolbox\GWToolbox.exe" /quiet
This section covers general set-up for running 32-bit Windows programs via wine. There are two options: First, you can install all of the necessary 32-bit libraries needed to run 32-bit wine. Second, on versions of wine >= 10.2, you can use the "new wow64 mode" to run 32-bit Windows programs inside 64-bit Linux processes.
Note: Unless Guild Wars is your very first foray into Linux gaming, you've probably already done this. If you have Steam installed, or can already play other 32-bit Windows games, then this is already done. In which case, you should skip this section.
Add i386 to multiarch:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
Install the 32-bit binaries for your graphics drivers. For AMD (open source drivers)(info):
sudo apt-get install libglx-mesa0:i386 mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386
For nVidia (proprietary drivers)(info):
sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-libs:i386
Install Wine and its dependencies, both 64- and 32-bit, by following the instructions at WineHQ.
(Note: sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-XXX may cause sane-airscan to be uninstalled and replaced with sane-airscan:i386. If this happens, just carry on with installing wine and then reinstall sane-airscan afterwards (which will remove sane-airscan:i386).
If you have wine >= 10.2, you may use the "new wow64 mode" to run 32-bit Windows programs inside 64-bit Linux processes. In this case, you do not need any 32-bit Linux system libraries. To use the "new wow64 mode," you must set the environment variable WINARCH=wow64 each time you invoke wine.
Many forks of wine exist, giving you many options you could use to run Guild Wars. This section will help you choose.
This guide presently recommends wine-staging from the official repo at WineHQ. This is simple to set up, and offers similar performance to any other option, after setting up DXVK (see Part 5) and ESYNC (see Part 6).
To install Wine and its dependencies, follow the instructions at WineHQ. If you choose to use a different version of wine that comes as unpackaged binaries, install this anyway to get the dependencies.
wine-staging is specifically recommended (as opposed to wine-stable or wine-devel) because it supports ESYNC. (See Part 6.)
This recommendation may change in the relatively near future when NTSYNC becomes available. It is expected that that NTSYNC will eventually find its way into all three wine branches (stable, devel, and staging), and that ESYNC will be removed. There may be a transitional period where a TkG build may be recommended to retain access to ESYNC/FSYNC if you don't have a new enough kernel for NTSYNC. (See Part 6.)
- "Distro" wine. Wine packaged by your Linux distribution. This is almost always an outdated version of official wine. There's pretty much no reason to ever use this. Reconfigure your package manager to use the official repo for wine.
- "TkG" wine. A custom build of wine that usually has the "staging" patches, plus a few other popular patches. For example, Kron4ek's TkG builds. The main selling point over official
wine-stagingis FSYNC. (See Part 6.) - Proton, inside Steam. A version of wine made by Valve for Steam featuring gaming/performance modifications. It is possible to add Guild Wars to Steam as a "non-Steam game." This is not recommended because Steam makes it difficult to run uMod and Toolbox in the same wine prefix, and very painful to install DirectSong. (See Part 15.)
- Proton, outside Steam. It is possible to run Proton, or wine with Proton-like modifications outside of Steam. In the past, this was recommended for maximum performance. However, Proton outside Steam is no longer recommended due to a showstopping Guild Wars bug, and also because it's very painful to install DirectSong. In the past year or so, the universe of "Proton without Steam" has mostly condensed into umu. Unfortunately, when running under umu, Guild Wars incorrectly detects that it's running under Steam, attempts to initialize the Steam API, then crashes when SteamAPI_Init() fails. This leaves few working options for "Proton outside Steam": You can use the outdated last build of Wine-GE from 2/2024, or Kron4ek's Proton builds which do not use the Steam Runtime.
It is possible to have more than one version of wine present on your system. By default, whichever version is installed as /usr/bin/wine is what will run when the wine command is invoked. Usually this will be "official" wine (or "distro" wine). Since that's the recommended version, simply invoking wine yields the correct result for most people. If you want to run a version of wine other than the one at /usr/bin/wine, you can do that via environment variables, like so:
export WINEVERPATH={top-level-wine-directory}
export WINELOADER={top-level-wine-directory}/bin/wine
export WINESERVER={top-level-wine-directory}/bin/wineserver
export WINEDLLPATH={top-level-wine-directory}/lib64/wine:{top-level-wine-directory}/lib/wine"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=top-level-wine-directory/lib64:{top-level-wine-directory}/lib
export PATH={top-level-wine-directory}/bin":$PATH
# this last one's for winetricks
export WINE={top-level-wine-directory}/bin/wine
(Note: Releases of custom wine are not consistent about their directory structures. You may need to make adjustments. WINEDLLPATH should point to directories that contain .dll files. LD_LIBRARY_PATH should point to directories that contain .so files. Neither of these are recursive; you must specify the directory directly containing the files.)
Additionally, Proton expects the Steam runtime environment. For versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the Steam runtime environment, this could be accomplished through a very complicated configuration for LD_LIBRARY_PATH. For Steam runtime 3.0, you pretty much need umu launcher (which, as explained above, doesn't work with Guild Wars). If your system is reasonably similar to whatever version of Ubuntu LTS Steam runtime is based on, you may be able to run Proton without the Steam runtime.
This is a basic installation of Guild Wars. Do this first to make sure that things are fundamentally working. (Note: These instructions use a 64-bit wine prefix.)
export WINEARCH=win64
export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw
winecfg
mkdir ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/temp
Download client from https://www.guildwars.com/en/download to ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/temp.
wine start /d "C:\temp" "C:\temp\GwSetup.exe"
Test that GW runs:
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"
Do not be alarmed if you encounter missing sound/music/graphics. It may not have been downloaded yet. Run GW with the -image switch to download a full dat file.
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -image
After downloading a full dat, conduct a more thorough play test to verify GW is working.
Now would also be a good time to symlink your build templates and screenshots directories to maintain consistency when switching between Windows versions.
Move anything inside ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/Program\ Files/Guild\ Wars/Templates and ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/Program\ Files/Guild\ Wars/Screens to the equivalent directories in ~/Documents, then delete them.
ln -s ~/Documents/Guild\ Wars/Templates/ ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Guild\ Wars/Templates
ln -s ~/Documents/Guild\ Wars/Screens/ ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Guild\ Wars/Screens
DXVK is a translation layer from Direct3D 8/9/10/11 to Vulkan. It offers a tremendous performance increase over wine's default DirectX-to-OpenGL translation. It also offers some graphical enhancements (see below) and enables/improves compatibility with various Vulkan-related things like gamescope, MangoHUD, and vkBasalt.
Note that, since DXVK translates into Vulkan, it requires a GPU/drivers with adequate Vulkan support. While every relatively recent GPU (including intergrated graphics) will suffice, some older devices might not be able to run DXVK. If in doubt, see here.
Download the latest relase of DXVK.
Extract the 32-bit dll files into ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/windows/syswow64
(Yes, that is correct. On 64-bit Windows, 32-bit libraries go in syswow64 and 64-bit libraries go in system32. Exactly the opposite of what you'd naturally think based on their names.) Optionally, back up or rename the original files before overwriting them.
Open winecfg...
export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw
winecfg
... go the the "Libraries" tab, and set overrides to "native, builtin" for each of the files you just overwrote. (Override names don't include the ".dll". So, for instance, the override name for d3d9.dll is just "d3d9".)
Now test. If it's working, this command should cause the DXVK HUD to appear in the upper left:
DXVK_HUD=1 wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"
If you have a powerful graphics card, DXVK can provide some graphical enhancements. Place dxvk.conf from the "extras" directory of this repo into your Guild Wars installation directory. With this DXVK config, if you turn on antialiasing via Guild Wars' in-game menu, DXVK will override it to 16x MSAA, with per-sample (rather than per pixel) shading. This noticeably improves the appearance of foliage, and also player armor with "frills" like several Vabbian sets. (If 16x proves too much for your graphics card, try 8x, or lower other settings. Even the most powerful cards available as of 2025 struggle with the combination of 4K, triple-digit monitor refresh rates, and 16x per-sample anti-aliasing during in-game combat. However, any two of those should be achievable on a broad cross-section of recent hardware. E.g., 4K/60Hz/16x or 4K/120+Hz/8x or 1080p/120+Hz/16x.)
Guild Wars suffers from a bug where, at very high framerates, players/heroes/henchmen/monsters/minipets/NPCs will appear to "teleport" from one place to another without visibly walking through the space in between. This bug can be avoided by reducing the framerate. DXVK provides an easy way to limit Guild Wars' framerate without otherwise impacting your system. If you suffer from this bug, place dxvk.conf from the "extras" directory of this repo into your Guild Wars installation directory, and remove the # from the d3d9.maxFrameRate line. The framerate at which the bug kicks in seems to be hardware dependent, so you may need to experiment. Many people report 144 as the highest framerate they can reach without encountering the bug. (Optionally, use #s to disable the antialiasing stuff in dxvk.conf if you don't want it.)
DXVK can replace Guild Wars' built-in vsync with mailbox present mode, an alternative implementation of vsync that gives the lowest possible frame latency without tearing. Mailbox present mode is recommended if your average framerate is at least 2x your monitor's refresh rate. At lower framerate-to-refresh-rate ratios, mailbox present mode tends to have noticeably juttery motion due to uneven frame latency. Since you will likely have to limit your framerate somewhere around 144 to avoid the "high FPS teleport" bug, mailbox present mode is really great for people with 60Hz monitors, but probably not desirable for high-refresh-rate monitors. To enable mailbox present mode, place dxvk.conf from the "extras" directory of this repo into your Guild Wars installation directory, remove the # from the dxvk.tearFree line, and disable native vsync in Guild Wars' in-game options. (You should probably also remove the # from the d3d9.maxFrameRate line. See above. Optionally, use #s to disable the antialiasing stuff if you don't want it.) Note: Not all GPUs/drivers support mailbox present mode. To check if your system supports it, download the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer and check if "MAILBOX" is present under "Surface" > "Present Modes".
ESYNC and FSYNC are alternative implementations for simulating Windows' thread synchronization that yield a significant performance increase for most games. (They also crash a small minority of games, but Guild Wars is not among them.) ESYNC and FSYNC have roughly equal performance.
ESYNC is available in the official wine-staging, TkG builds, and Proton. ESYNC is disabled by default and must be enabled by setting the enviroment variable WINEESYNC=1. (In Proton, it's enabled by default, unless disabled by the environment variable PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1.) You only need to set this variable when playing Guild Wars. It does not need to be set for the installation/setup/testing/configuration tasks in ths guide.
ESYNC uses a large number of file descriptors. This poses a problem on some Linux distros that set a very low default limit for how many file descriptors one process may create. To check the limit on your system, use ulimit -Hn. 1048576 is considered acceptably high for ESYNC in general. (Since Guild Wars doesn't make heavy use of multithreading, 524288 is probably enough too.) To change the default limit on a distro that uses systemd, edit both /etc/systemd/system.conf and /etc/systemd/user.conf, uncommenting and changing the appropriate line to DefaultLimitNOFILE=1048576, then reboot. To change the default limit on a distro that doesn't use systemd, edit /etc/security/limits.conf, adding lines
{your-username} soft nofile 1048576
{your-username} hard nofile 1048576
and then reboot.
Testing: You should see "esync: up and running." the console output when you run wine with ESYNC active.
FSYNC is available in most TkG builds and Proton. FSYNC must be enabled by setting the enviroment variable WINEFSYNC=1. (In Proton, it's enabled by default, unless disabled by the environment variable PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1.) If FSYNC is enabled (and supported by the kernel), then ESYNC is disabled automatically. You only need to set this variable when playing Guild Wars. It does not need to be set for the installation/setup/testing/configuration tasks in ths guide.
FSYNC does not care about the file descriptor limit, but it does require kernel support. The current iteration of FSYNC (futex_waitv) requires kernel >=5.16.
Testing: You should see "fsync: up and running." the console output when you run wine with FSYNC active.
NTSYNC is a forthcoming successor to ESYNC and FSYNC. Performance will be similar. The main difference is that, unlike ESYNC and FSYNC, NTSYNC is a fully correct reproduction of Windows' thread synchronization behavior. Accordingly, it is expected that NTSYNC will be merged into mainline wine, enabled by default, and ESYNC and FSYNC will be removed. NTSYNC requires kernel support that is expected to be merged in kernel 6.14.
This part of this guide will require substantial revisions when that happens. (Unfortunately, the next Debian stable release is about to freeze its kernel at 6.12. Which means the state of affairs where everyone can use NTSYNC is probably years away.)
TexMod, uMod, and gMod are a family of utilities for replacing in-game textures. This enables graphical mods, such as removing the "frost" overlay from the skillbar, making UI elements translucent, spirit radar, etc. Of particular note is the famous Cartography Made Easy mod that clearly shows which bits of fog can be removed for progress towards the cartography title. Files for TexMod and uMod can be found in the "extras" directory of this repo. gMod can be downloaded from its github page.
TexMod is the original texture-replacing tool from 2006. It is not recommended for playing Guild Wars, as it has occasional display bugs that are fixed in uMod and gMod. However, TexMod is useful for dumping textures if you want to make mods. Since uMod's texture dumping interface doesn't work in Linux, and gMod doesn't do texture dumping at all, TexMod is the only choice. No special installation is required. Simply extract the archive somewhere somewhere in the wine prefix and use TexMod to launch Guild Wars. For instance:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\TexMod" "C:\Program Files (x86)\TexMod\Texmod.exe"
uMod is an improved, open-source rewrite of TexMod from 2011. The version with best compatibility for Guild Wars is v1_r44. uMod is suitable for playing Guild Wars. However, if you want to make mods, its texture dumping interface doesn't work in Linux. No special installation is required. Simply extract the archive somewhere somewhere in the wine prefix. uMod offers two ways to "hook" Guild Wars.
- First, you can simply run uMod, and then start Guild Wars via uMod's "Main -> Start game through uMod" menu option.
- Second, you can copy
d3d9.dllfrom uMod's directory to Guild Wars' directory. Now if you start uMod first, and then start Guild Wars normally, uMod should "hook" Guild Wars. (Note: On some versions of wine, the dll load order seems to be inconsistent in some weird prefix dependent way. If this doesn't work, try making a fresh prefix, or try a different version of wine.) In either event:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\uMod" "C:\Program Files (x86)\uMod\uMod.exe"
gMod is a simplified continuation of uMod with ongoing development since 2023. gMod removes uMod's UI, on-the-fly texture loading/unloading/reloading, texture dumping, etc. in favor of once-at-launch configuration via a simple text file. Consequently, gMod is more performant than either TexMod or uMod. Unless you need uMod's ability to load and unload mods while Guild Wars is running, gMod is probably the best choice. gMod offers two ways to "hook" Guild Wars.
- First, you can rename
gmod.dlltod3d9.dlland place it in Guild Wars' directory. Then start Guild Wars normally. (Note: On some versions of wine, the dll load order seems to be inconsistent in some weird prefix dependent way. If this doesn't work, try making a fresh prefix, or try a different version of wine.) - Second, you can inject
gmod.dllinto the Guild Wars process before it loadsdxd9.dll. gMod is integrated into GW Launcher (see Part 14), and also works with simple commandline injectors like Injectory. Which, assuming everything is in the Guild Wars directory, would work like this:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\injectory.x86.exe" -l Gw.exe -i gMod.dll
Since gMod doesn't have a user interface, you need to use a text file to tell it which mods to load. Create ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/Program Files/Guild Wars/modlist.txt and populate it with a list of mod files (uMod's tpf or zip format), one per line, by full Windows paths.
DirectSong is the official add-on for playing collector's edition and bonus music in Guild Wars. It is now completely defunct, since it depends on ancient Windows libraries that have been obsolete since 2009, and Jeremy Soule has completely abandoned the project.
Recent versions of wine use winegstreamer to decode wma files. However, gstreamer needs the libav (ffmpeg) plugin to do this. On Debian, this package is called gstreamer1.0-libav; it might have other names on other distros. You need the 32-bit version, unless you are using the "new wow64 mode" (in which case you need the 64-bit version).
If you're using 32-bit libraries for 32-bit support:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-libav:i386
If you're using the "new wow64 mode" in wine >= 10.2 for 32-bit support:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-libav
Additionally, you need wmvcore.dll and wmasf.dll from Windows Media Player 10 or 11. Copies of these files are available in the "extras" directory of this repo. Place them into Guild Wars' directory, then open winecfg...
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw winecfg
... go the the "Libraries" tab, and set overrides to "native, builtin" for "wmvcore" and "wmasf".
Finally, you need DirectSong itself, and music to go with it. Download the DirectSong Revivial Pack. This contains the DirectSong files along with all of the collector's edition and bonus music.
Extract the DirectSong directory to somewhere in your wine prefix. In this example, it's simply in the root of C:.
Now run RegisterDirectSongDirectory.exe with the DirectSong directory as the working directory.
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine start /d "C:\DirectSong" "C:\DirectSong\RegisterDirectSongDirectory.exe"
(As an alternative to running RegisterDirectSongDirectory.exe, you can create the necessary registry key with regedit. Sample .reg files are provided in the "extras" directory of this repo. Use the "Win32" or "Win64" file that matches your wine prefix (which will be win64 if you've been following this guide), edit it to point to your DirectSong directory, and import it with redegit:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine regedit"
)
To test that DirectSong is working, start Guild Wars, wait until the login screen music has been playing for a few seconds, press F11, and look for a gold DirectSong icon at the bottom of the sound menu.
Since it may fail silently, you should also test that wma decoding is working. (If it's not working, DirectSong shows the gold icon, but skips wma files.) To test this, edit ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/DirectSong/Guild Wars/GuildWars.ds. Find the line that starts with "loginen" and copy/paste some distinctive wma file to the start of that list. When you start Guild Wars, that wma file should be the first thing played on the login screen.
See Part 15.
Proton bundles its own gstreamer that can't decode wma. To work around this, you need to install Windows Media Player 11. This is a large pain in the arse. So much so that you should probably strongly consider just using a non-Proton version of wine rather than proceeding with these instructions.
- Use
winecfgto set the Windows version to WinXP. - Use
winetricksto installwmp11. - Use
winecfgto set the Windows version to Win2003. (This is the only way to pass the validation screen.) - You must run Windows Media Player to complete installation.
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe"- The validation screen will hang for a long time, but eventually pass.
- After the EULA screen, Windows Media Player will hang or crash. Force kill it, and make sure to kill any zombie wine processes.
- Use
winecfgto set the Windows version to WinXP. wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe"- This time, the first-run installation tasks will complete and Windows Media Player will start. The UI is unusable, and you will need to force kill it.
- Use
winecfgto set the Windows version back to whatever you started with. - Installing Windows Media Player added a bunch of crap file associations to
~/.local/share/applications. You probably want to delete them. - Install DirectSong itself as described above.
DSOAL-GW1 is a fork a DSOAL that has been modified to work with Guild Wars. DSOAL is a DirectSound-to-OpenAL compatibility layer that is able to emulate DirectSound3D and EAX in software. Put simply, this makes it possible to activate GW’s “Use 3D Audio Hardware” and “Use EAX” options and to hear GW's sound effects as originally intended.
Download the latest release of DSOAL-GW1.
Extract dsound.dll and dsoal-aldrv.dll to Guild War's directory. (Note: On some versions of wine, the dll load order seems to be inconsistent in some weird prefix dependent way. If this doesn't work, try making a fresh prefix, or try a different version of wine. Or, if all else fails, put them in syswow64.)
Open winecfg...
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw winecfg
... go the the "Libraries" tab, and set an override for "dsound" to "native, builtin".
Extract the hrtf_defs and presets folders to ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/users/<your username>/AppData/Roaming/openal/. And extract the individual mhr files from HRTF_OAL_1.19.0.zip into ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/users/<your username>/AppData/Roaming/openal/hrtf. (Do not extract the containing directory structure.) You may need to create these directories.
Extract alsoft.ini to the Guild Wars directory.
Consult DSOAL-GW1_readme.txt for how to edit alsoft.ini and the preset files to configure them for your speaker or headphone setup.
In order to activate “Use 3D Audio Hardware” and “Use EAX,” you must run Guild Wars one time with the -dsound flag:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -dsound
Now you should be able to check the boxes in the in-game sound menu accessible by pressing F11. These settings are stored in the dat file, so DSOAL-GW1 will continue to work without the -dsound flag once they are activated.
(There are a couple of alternative ways to activate the “Use 3D Audio Hardware” and “Use EAX” settings: You can use winecfg to set the Windows version to XP, then run Guild Wars. Or you can copy a dat file that already has these settings activated from somewhere.)
To test that DSOAL-GW1 is working, set the following environment variables, run Guild Wars, and then check that the log files were created and report everything working.
export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw
export DSOAL_LOGLEVEL=2
export DSOAL_LOGFILE="C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\DSOAL_log.txt"
export ALSOFT_LOGLEVEL=3
export ALSOFT_LOGFILE="C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\ALSOFT_log.txt"
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"
For further details, consult DSOAL-GW1_readme.txt.
GWToolbox++ is a collection of several tools and QoL enhancements for Guild Wars. Toolbox had long been the subject of sometimes heated debate about its merits versus the risk of getting your account banned, when, in May 2024, A-Net unexpectedly announced that toolbox is permitted for PvE. Even if you never use its other features, Toolbox is an absolute must-have for the fast travel feature alone.
Download the latest Toolbox launcher to somewhere in the wine prefix and run it. For instance:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\GWToolbox" "C:\Program Files (x86)\GWToolbox\GWToolbox.exe"
The launcher will create a directory at ~/Documents/GWToolboxpp/ containing the dll file and configuration data. (If wine prefix isolation is active, this will instead be created inside the prefix in the virtual user's "Documents" directory.)
We now have two options to run Toolbox:
One option is to use the launcher. When Guild Wars is running, the launcher should show the option to select a running Guild Wars instance by character name. You can start the launcher before or after you start Guild Wars.
The other option is to inject the Toolbox dll silently via a command-line tool. The selling point of this option is that you can attain a zero-click Toolbox startup. Toolbox's launcher has a /quiet option that automatically injects if it only sees one Gw.exe process:
#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw
{launch Guild Wars, maybe launch uMod first}
sleep 1
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\GWToolbox" "C:\Program Files (x86)\GWToolbox\GWToolbox.exe /quiet"
It's also possible to inject the Toolbox dll with generic injection utilities like injectory or Injector. A potentially useful feature of Injectory is the ability to launch Gw.exe in a paused state and inject before it starts running:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\injectory.x86.exe" -l Gw.exe -i "C:\users\<your username>\Documents\GWToolboxpp\GWToolboxdll.dll"
Injectory supports injecting multiple dlls at once, so you can do both gMod and Toolbox with:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\injectory.x86.exe" -l Gw.exe -i gMod.dll -i "C:\users\<your username>\Documents\GWToolboxpp\GWToolboxdll.dll"
Install the community-maintained chat filter list to silence most of the obnoxious RMT spam in Kamadan:
Download ChatFilter.ini from here or here (they should be the same file) to ~/Documents/Guild Wars/.
Symlink it into the GW directory. (We use a symlink so you can update multiple wine prefixes at once.)
ln -s ~/Documents/Guild\ Wars/ChatFilter.ini ~/.wine-gw/drive_c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Guild\ Wars/ChatFilter.ini
GW's UI was designed almost a decade before the first consumer 4K monitor was released. Even set to the largest size, the UI is painfully dinky at 4K. This section discusses solutions for getting a bigger UI with minimal loss of quality. If you don't use a 4K monitor, skip this section.
The solution that Linux is gravitating towards for this sort of problem is gamescope with FSR scaling. Gamescope is a nesting microcompositor that provides a virtual screen that appears within a window on your actual desktop. FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) is a spatial upscaling algorithm with output that looks very similar to native 4K. For our use case, we make GW believe it's running fullscreen at, say, 2954x1662, then use FSR scaling up to a 3840x2160 fullscreen window on our actual screen. So we end up with a bigger UI and pseudo-4K resolution.
Gamescope 3.11: This is an older version of gamescope with excellent compatibility with Guild Wars. It's still available in some slow-moving distros like Debian stable.
It's also possible to install gamescope 3.11 side-by-side with a newer version, as follows: First, install gamescope 3.11 and libwlroots10 >=0.15.0 manually (using packages from an old release), installing up-to-date versions of other dependencies as needed. Then copy /usr/games/gamescope to something like oldgamescope. Finally, upgrade gamescope. You can run gamescope 3.11 as oldgamescope and the up-to-date version as gamescope. (This trick will probably stop working eventually as the dependencies upgrade. But hopefully the problems with the current version will be ironed out by then.)
Gamescope >=3.16: The current version of gamescope does not have good compatibility with Guild Wars. It has trouble with games that show a non-fullscreen splash screen when starting. Whether it works depends on the version of gamescope, the version of wine, the version of various wayland libraries, whether it's running under the Steam runtime, and whether you're starting Gw.exe directly or via a launcher/injector. Changes or updates to any of these may unexpectedly break, or fix, gamescope working with Guild Wars. (The one thing that consistently worked, until recently, was to use Proton and the Steam runtime. But the Guild Wars bug explained in Part 3 broke that option.)
To install the current version of gamescope:
sudo apt-get install gamescope
Notes:
- The syntax changed slightly between gamescope 3.11 and 3.16. Use
gamescope --helpto figure it out.- gamescope 3.11 example:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw gamescope -w 2954 -h 1662 -W 3840 -H 2160 -U --fsr-sharpness 10 -f -- wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" - gamescope 3.16 example:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-gw gamescope -w 2954 -h 1662 -W 3840 -H 2160 -F fsr --fsr-sharpness 3 -f -- wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"
- gamescope 3.11 example:
- To avoid confusing bash, it's usually necessary to put a -- after gamescope's parameters. Otherwise any parameters meant for the Windows program may be misinterpreted as additional parameters to gamescope. (See the examples above.)
- Unlike a naked
wine start, gamescope does not exit until GW exits. So, if you want to do things in a launcher script after starting GW, you'll need a&or-- &at the end of gamescope's line. - Important! Turn up in-game anti-aliasing to the max. (Or even use the 16x, per-sample "super antialising" described in Part 5.) A substantial part of the FSR algorithm is "reverse anti-aliasing" to recover the higher resolution image that was used for anti-aliasing.
--fsr-sharpnessranges from 0 (sharpest) to 20 (smoothest). This is a matter of taste. The scale seems to be a little different depending on the version of gamescope. Also, the same sharpness setting gives different results depending on the game's antialiasing setting.- The choice of fake fullscreen resolution makes a trade off between UI size and graphical quality. 2954x1662 is what AMD recommends as "ultra quality." See here for more details.
Gamescope Limitations:
- While gamescope works great with a AMD GPU, nVidia driver support is spotty. It took a long time for nVidia to add a crucial feature to their driver, then it worked but was buggy on older cards, and then recently the v555 nVidia driver completely broke gamescope. And they will probably break it again with future drivers. Gamescope may not work if you have an nVidia GPU.
- You cannot launch two different programs in the same gamescope instance, unless one launches the other.
- If you launch Guild Wars in gamescope, the Toolbox launcher will crash when trying to find Guild Wars' window. You need to inject toolbox using the
/quietoption or a generic commandline injector. - If you launch Guild Wars and uMod independently, using the dll to hook Guild Wars, then Guild Wars will crash after the splash screen.
- If you launch uMod, and then launch Guild Wars from inside uMod, that will work. However, there's no way to return focus to uMod's UI. So you might as well use gMod.
- If you launch Guild Wars via a commandline injector like Injectory, that will work. At least in gamescope 3.11. Whether this works is hit-or-miss in gamescope >=3.16, as described above.
- If you launch Guild Wars in gamescope, the Toolbox launcher will crash when trying to find Guild Wars' window. You need to inject toolbox using the
An alternative solution is to use a version of wine with the "FSR fake resolution patch" found in Wine-GE and Proton-GE. The behavior is similar to gamescope: Wine tells GW that it's running fullscreen at, say, 2960x1665, then uses FSR scaling to produce 3840x2160 output. The fake resolution is controlled by way of environment variables. For example:
#export WINE_FULLSCREEN_FAKE_CURRENT_RES=2960x1665
#export WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1
#export WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR_STRENGTH=5
WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR_STRENGTH ranges from 0 (sharpest) to 5 (smoothest) (or 1 to 20 in earlier iterations), and is a matter of taste. As with gamescope, set the in-game anti-aliasing to max.
Unfortunately, Wine-GE and Proton-GE have been discontinued in favor of umu, which, as explained above, does not work with Guild Wars. Also, the "FSR fake resolution patch" may not work correctly in wayland, depending on your wayland library versions.
Paw*ned2 is a build manager for Guild Wars.
Download the installer.
Run it:
wine </path to/>pwndSetup_en.exe
Now you can run paw*ned2 with:
wine start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\pawned2" "C:\Program Files (x86)\pawned2\pawned2.exe"
Note: The installer is old and installs a version of paw*ned2 from 2013. You need to use the self-updater in paw*ned2's help menu to get a newer version that can handle the anniversary skills.
Note: If you are using gamescope for Guild Wars, then install paw*ned2 to a different wine prefix from Guild Wars. Otherwise it will crash if you try to run them at the same time.
Note: Paw*ned2 has terrible high dpi support.
Running multiple instances of Guild Wars at the same time is much easier in Linux than Windows. Simply install GW into multiple wine prefixes. Each copy will run isolated from the others. This is the recommended way to multibox Guild Wars on Linux.
Note: Yes, you can copy/paste a whole wine prefix. And, yes, that is the fastest way to do this. Just make sure to correct any symlinks you made so they point to the copies.
Note: Since Toolbox settings/data are shared, it might be possible to clobber one instance by changing settings/data in another. If this turns out to cause problems, try winetricks sandbox or disable desktop inntegration in winecfg.
GW Launcher is a Windows multiboxing solution, but it can be run in wine. While Linux users have little use for it as a multiboxing solution, you might possibly want to use it for its other features. To install GW Launcher:
- Use winetricks to install dotnetdesktop8.
- Use the "framework dependent" version of the exe file.
- When creating a profile in GWLauncher, check the box for "run elevated."
GW Launcher will attempt to inject any dll files you put in its "plugins" directory. This is one way to inject Toolbox. It will also inject its own copy of gMod if you put any tpf or zip files in the "plugins" directory. If you'd rather use uMod than gMod, then don't put any tpf or zip files in GW Launcher's "plugins" directory, and run uMod by renaming its dll as described in Part 7 or putting its dll in GW Launcher's "plugins" directory to be injected.
As noted in Part 3, running Guild Wars inside Steam is not recommended because it makes it difficult to install and use many of the add-ons covered in this guide. However, in some circumstances (e.g., Steam Deck), you might nevertheless really, really want to do that. This section explains how to work around those difficulties.
In the lower left corner of Steam's "Library" view, select "Add a Game," and then "Add a Non-Steam Game," then browse for wherever Gw.exe is located and select it.
The fields in the "Properties" menu "Shortcut" tab should auto-populate. Change the name to exactly "Guild Wars" to gain access to community controller layouts and such.
In the "Properties" menu "Compatibility" tab, set it to use whatever version of Proton you like.
Something important to note: When you add a non-Steam game to Steam, Steam creates a more-or-less copy of its wine prefix at {steam directory}/steamapps/compatdata/{random numbers}/pfx. ({steam directory} is probably ~/.steam/steam, but it varies by distro and when you fist installed Steam.) When you launch Guild Wars via Steam, this is the wine prefix being used. This has several consequences of note:
- All the add-ons (Toolbox, DirectSong, etc.) need to be installed into this new prefix.
winecfgneeds to be invoked for this prefix.- The original wine prefix isn't used anymore, and you can even delete everything except for the Guild Wars directory.
- When you launch Guild Wars, the working directory from Windows' point of view is way the heck off in the Z:\ drive, several layers deep, likely behind a path name that's a pain to work with. To make life easier, symlink the Guild Wars directory into
Program Files (x86)in the new prefix. - Because Steam manages this prefix, and might decide to delete it without warning you, you should symlink anything you care about keeping (e.g., DirectSong music, build templates, Toolbox config files, etc.) rather than actually putting it inside the prefix.
The cause of most Steam-related headaches is that Gw.exe is the only command Steam wants to run in that wine prefix. You need to bypass this behavior in order to install or use add-ons. You can use bash string manipulation to make Steam run an arbitrary command in place of Gw.exe.
To run arbitrary commands in Steam, first download and save steamarbitrarycommand.sh from this repo's "extras" directory. Now in the "Properties" menu "Shortcut" tab, set "LAUNCH OPTIONS" to {path_to_script}/steamarbitrarycommand.sh %command% --run {real_command} where {real_command} is the command you want run instead of Gw.exe. (Credit: This script came from here.)
This script makes it possible to run winecfg to change dll overrides, or run cmd for a Windows command prompt for RegisterDirectSongDirectory.exe, or regedit to edit the registry directly, etc.
A secondary cause of headaches with Steam is that it only wants to run one command at a time in a given wine prefix. This is a problem if you want to run Guild Wars, uMod, and Toolbox's launcher simultaneously, for example. The workaround for this is to use steamarbitrarycommand.sh to launch a Windows .bat script in place of Gw.exe, having the .bat script run multiple programs. Place your .bat script in the Guild Wars installation directory and invoke {path_to_script}/steamarbitrarycommand.sh %command% --run example.bat.
Example .bat script:
echo off
cd /D "C:\Program Files (x86)\uMod"
start uMod.exe
ping -n 3 127.0.0.1 > nul
REM need to symlink GW directory so that it exists here in the prefix
cd ..
cd "Guild Wars"
start Gw.exe
ping -n 5 127.0.0.1 > nul
cd ..
cd GWToolbox
start GWToolbox.exe
What is ping doing there? Proton doesn't have timeout; ping works as a substitute because it sends pings one second apart, so the duration is about -n minus 1 seconds. (127.0.0.1 is the local loopback address, i.e., yourself.)
You can download a sample steamlauncher.bat from the "extras" directory of this repo.
(As an alternative, steamtinkerlaunch might also be able to do some of the arbitrary/multiple command things a "full bells and whistles" Guild Wars needs.)
Protontricks is a wrapper around winetricks that makes it easier to install Windows components and such into Steam's wine prefixes. You will need this to get DirectSong working. It also offers an easy way to invoke winecfg for the prefix.
Do not install DXVK manually if running Guild Wars under Steam. Steam swaps around symlinks for DirectX dlls at launch time depending on the run options you select. DXVK is used by default. If using a dxvk.conf file, place it in the Guild Wars directory. See Part 5 for more information.
Steam enables FSYNC by default, and ESYNC by default if FSYNC is disabled or unsupported by your kernel. If you want to turn them off, set the environment variables PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 and/or PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1. See Part 6 for more information.
Extract TexMod into Steam's Guild Wars wine prefix at {steam directory}/steamapps/compatdata/{random numbers}/pfx/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/TexMod. Use steamarbitrarycommand.sh to launch TexMod in place of Gw.exe, then launch Guild Wars from inside TexMod. See Part 7 for more information.
Extract uMod into Steam's Guild Wars wine prefix at {steam directory}/steamapps/compatdata/{random numbers}/pfx/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/uMod.
If you want to launch Guild Wars from inside uMod, use steamarbitrarycommand.sh to launch uMod in place of Gw.exe. See Part 7 for more information.
If you want to use the dll hook, copy d3d9.dll from uMod's directory to Guild Wars' directory, and use steamarbitrarycommand.sh to launch a .bat script that starts uMod, sleeps for a moment, then launches Guild Wars. See the example .bat file above. See Part 7 for more information.
Just rename gmod.dll to d3d9.dll and place it in Guild Wars' directory. See Part 7 for more information.
Getting DirectSong working with Steam is a major headache. Proton uses its own bundled gstreamer plugins rather than your system libraries, and they are not able to decode wma files. So you need to install Windows Media Player 11 inside Steam's Guild Wars wine prefix:
- Install protontricks. You will need it.
- Use either
protontricksorsteamarbitrarycommand.shto invokewinecfgand set the Windows version to WinXP. - Use
protontricksto installwmp11. - Use either
protontricksorsteamarbitrarycommand.shto invokewinecfgand set the Windows version to Win2003. - Use
steamarbitrarycommand.shto invokecmd. Insidecmd, navigate toC:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Playerand runsetup_wm.exe. It will crash on the third screen; that's OK. - Use either
protontricksorsteamarbitrarycommand.shto invokewinecfgand set the Windows version back to whatever you started with (probably Win10). - Symlink the DirectSong directory into Steam's Guild Wars wine prefix at
{steam directory}/steamapps/compatdata/{random numbers}/pfx/drive_c/DirectSong. (Use a symlink so that you don't lose a gigabyte of music files if Steam decides to delete the prefix without warning.) - Use
steamarbitrarycommand.shto invokecmd. Insidecmd, navigate toC:\DirectSongand runRegisterDirectSongDirectory.exe.
See Part 8 for more information.
The installation is the same as outside of Steam, bearing in mind that the wine prefix is now {steam directory}/steamapps/compatdata/{random numbers}/pfx. Put dsound.dll and dsoal-aldrv.dll in the Guild Wars directory. Use either protontricks or steamarbitrarycommand.sh to invoke winecfg to set the dll override for dsound. Put the assorted OpenAL files in {steam directory}/steamapps/compatdata/{random numbers}/pfx/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/openal. Run Guild Wars once with -dsound to make the boxes in the in-game sound menu accessible. See Part 9 for more information.
Proton does not pass along the environment variables that tell DSOAL-GW and ALSOFT to log to files. If you want to turn on logging to check that everything is working, use steamarbitrarycommand.sh to run cmd, then use SET DSOAL_LOGLEVEL=2 etc. and run Gw.exe from inside cmd.
Installing Toolbox inside Steam entails a few extra headaches:
- Download
GWToolbox.exeinto Steam's Guild Wars wine prefix at{steam directory}/steamapps/compatdata/{random numbers}/pfx/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/GWToolbox. - Use
steamarbitrarycommand.shto launch a .bat file that starts Guild Wars, sleeps for a few seconds, then starts Toolbox. See the example above. - Toolbox will create a directory at
{steam directory}/steamapps/compatdata/{random numbers}/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/GWToolboxppand try to downloadGWToolboxdll.dllinto it and it will fail. You must manually download the dll file from Toolbox's github and put it there. It seems that Toolbox somehow lacks permissions to create that file. Fortunately, it is able to execute it, and also overwrite it when Toolbox updates. - Try your .bat file again. It should work now.
Toolbox's /quiet parameter is a bit flakey inside Steam. It sometimes causes Guild Wars to black screen and hang. If this happens to you, try changing the delay before starting Toolbox, or just don't use /quiet.
See Part 10 for more information.