Recently I wrote a small utility which allows you to play a copy of Guild Wars which resides on a flash drive or portable harddrive. This means that you can take Guild Wars with you when you travel, and play it on any computer you encounter without installing it. Just plug your drive in, launch Portable GW, and go Charr hunting! It's open-source, and written in NSIS.
I'd appreciate it if some of you (who own Guild Wars) could download and test for me. I look forward to any feedback the community offers. Thanks!
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Before you posted this here I found a link to your homepage on a GW forum where you posted it. Very nice.
Only problem is that the computers I run it on tend to reboot randomly when Guild Wars is running. I've tried setting EVERY in-game option to its lowest, running with -noshaders, tried -windowed, tried -opengl.... no luck, it reboots after 30 to 60 minutes of proper operation. This is with or without your launcher.
check it it's not too hot
it might reboot because of heating
Embrace your dreams
Might be a bad idea to do this kind of thing as Guild Wars stores and streams all of its game data to a single file in the application data. This means that your installation of Guild Wars might end up taking up one gigabyte of information after you play it for just three or four hours. Might also take a very long time to load and save information if you're using it on a slow device.
Rob Loach [Website] [Projects]
Has anyone discovered a way to compress the data file more. The only thing keeping me from trying it is the 2GB install. I suppose I could just upgrade to a 4 gb thumb drive
but was wondering if there was anything that wouldn't cost me more money. Have the original program on a portable 120GB drive, so I usually just install the client and copy the data file over then run the decompress.
I've just installed it on my IPOD's harddrive and it works very well. Nicely done! It's at 1.25GB so far...
Rob Loach [Website] [Projects] [Blog]
What's the point of making GW portable? I'm new to this, but I assumed that GW already ways: All you need to do is upload the client and game data, launch the client and click on "Launch from current location".
That's how I run it with my portable HDD whenever I hang out at the Internet Cafe. Runs without a hitch.
I guess there's more to it than I'm aware of?
We are what we download
We are what we download
Without a launcher for Guild Wars, in order to play it, you needed to download the client, install it, download initial game data, start the game, download level data and then play it.
With the launcher, in order to play it all you have to do it run the launcher. All game data is kept persistent on your key. This means you don't have to re-download all the game data.
Use the launcher if you want, otherwise keep on using your system...
Rob Loach [Website] [Projects] [Blog]