FW: Re: Wine testing and Guild Wars: Factions Beta weekend March 24th

[Jeremiah Powell]

Please see below.

>From: Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org>
>To: "Jeremiah Powell" <waveclaw at hotmail.com>
>Subject: Re: Wine testing and Guild Wars: Factions Beta weekend March 24th
>
>"Jeremiah Powell" <waveclaw at hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > I would like to extend this opportunity to someone in the wine
> > development community.  Who would like a chance to collect data on the
> > behavior of running Guild Wars under wine?
> >
> > How about for free?
>
>That sounds good, you should ask on wine-devel, I'm sure people would
>be interested.
>
>--
>Alexandre Julliard
>julliard at winehq.org

I have 3 guest keys for the Guildwars: Factions BWE starting March 24th. 
Everyone I know already plays Guildwars on Windows.  The Wine D3D support 
has gotten to the point of running Guildwars in a playable state[1].  I'd 
like offer these keys to the wine developers for debug purposes. In 
particular, I'd like committers on the D3D subsystem and the sound systems 
to enjoy a little free game time while collecting some valuable data[2].

There are only 3 keys.  These are free TRIAL accounts, good for only that 
weekend. If you buy the game, you can open the accounts back up at a later 
time.  The game client generates the account-contact emails from personal 
email addresses I give it, but  they are in no other way assocaited with my 
account(s).  Please reply to me directly if you want the keys, but keep the 
spam to a minimum.  A list of people getting the keys can be posted if the 
list wants.

JD 'too much hotmail spam anyway' Powell
---

1. While not stable, normal play is possible. I use SuSE OSS 10 with ATI's 
fglx drivers, and Cedega chokes on for this 'supported' game during screen 
changes, which the Wine D3D code handles gracefully.

2. From the appdb:

Guildwars is a pure DirectX game that uses no opengl, no SDL, etc.   
Guildwars was functional under wine until the September 2005 Sorrow's 
Furnace update.  Now game client has two modes in which it can be run.  
Normally, guildwars tried to use DirectX's shading language.  This causes it 
to fail under Wine.  With the '-noshaders' option, the game falls back on 
only the older DirectX calls.

Other interesting features include toggling sound support with '-nosound' 
and output of triangles, fps, networking information with 'perfs' and  
starting in a window with '-windowed.' A 3rd party sound expansion is 
available that integrates with the DRM system in Media Player 9, but can be 
patched out by moving the DLL to another location.