Guild Wars 2 Linux Multibox Launcher Script

Gw2Launcher is a fantastic tool for windows, and the author is thankfully responsive to Linux issues, but the tool relies on a poorly documented Windows feature to kill the GW2 mutex which does not always consistently work through wine. See Healix/Gw2Launcher#249 (comment) for the comment which inspired me to build this.

Because each WINEPREFIX has a separate windows-like environment, the mutex is not shared between WINEPREFIXs, allowing simultaneous instances of the game from distinct WINEPREFIXs. However, the Gw2.dat file is 76 G and counting, making storing multiple instances challenging.

This script uses fuse-overlayfs to dynamically create WINEPREFIXs with minimal overhead, runs the game, and uses xdotool to detect launches (allowing sequential launch to avoid X11 CPU overuse trying to draw overlapping odd geometry partially transparent windows). Other dependencies which are usually installed by default: bash, setsid (probably from util-linux) and pgrep (probably from procps-ng).

To use this script you need to already be able to run GW2 from the command line (if you have a working install via Lutris, you can generate one with something like lutris guild-wars-2 --output-script gw2.sh). You need a working cli launch script, as you use configuration from that to tell this runner how to launch the game.

This script works great on the two machines I use (one Arch Linux, one Fedora; it previously worked on another Arch host without a Lutris install as well), but will need broader testing to verify it works for others; consider this an alpha release. The command line options have already changed once, and may again.

Support

Please let me know if you find any bugs - especially if you also have generalizable fixes. I may not have time to add features, and want to keep the script relatively simple - if you have a great idea, feel free to let me know about it, implement it, and/or fork the codebase as necessary.

If you'd like help running this, or are having trouble installing GW2 on your Linux distribution I'd be interested in helping. Contact me via email or Discord (iiridayn, iiridayn+gw2alts@gmail.com) if you've exhausted other support avenues and are willing to wait around for me to be available to help. Follow the principle of don't ask to ask.

Usage examples

Note that these examples assume you have gw2-alt.sh in your PATH.

Set up a new account (once the program is set up) or update settings:

gw2-alt.sh -o 04 # change options/configure; only 1 account at at time

When the game releases updates, each alt must update their Local.dat:

gw2-alt.sh -u 01 02 03 # run in update-only mode

Launch multiple accounts, waiting for each to load before launching the next:

gw2-alt.sh 01 02 03

Installation

1. Install GW2 normally and ensure it runs.
2. Create a launch script, and ensure it runs GW2 from the command line (from Lutris, you would create it with lutris guild-wars-2 --output-script gw2.sh).
3. Backup your GFXSettings.GW2-64.exe.xml (from <gw2 WINEPREFIX>/drive_c/users/$USER/AppData/Roaming/Guild Wars 2/), run the game and set graphics to values you'd like to run multiple clients with (all minimums likely), then stash the modified GFXSettings.GW2-64.exe.xml and restore your nice one for regular use.
4. Download the script and make sure it's executable (chmod +x <downloaded filename>)
5. Run the script - for example ./gw2-alt.sh to run it from the current directory. This will create a config file.
6. Edit the config.sh file created - ensure you provide the path to the GW2 WINE prefix and all the environment variables required to run the game, copied from your working launch script from step 2.
7. Run the script again - this will create the runtime and data directories
8. Copy your stashed GFXSettings.GW2-64.exe.xml to the data directory.

Setting up accounts

To set up an account, ensure no other accounts are running, then run gw2-alt.sh -o account-name. Save the username and password, log in and launch the account and change local settings however you'd like to keep them, then close the game client. From now on you can launch that account as gw2-alt.sh account-name. If you want to change local settings for that account again, you have to launch it while no other accounts are running using the -o option again.

If you want a space in the account name, you must refer to it with quotes around it every time, or it thinks you want to launch an account per word. This should work - please let me know if you use it and run into problems.

Running Accounts

GW2 Configuration without Lutris

For a system without a Lutris install, I was able to run the game with the following environment:

export WINEARCH="win64"

export WINEESYNC="1"
export WINEFSYNC="1"
export WINE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE="1"

export __GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE="1"
export __GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_PATH="$GW2_BASE_WINEPREFIX"
export __GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_SKIP_CLEANUP=1

# Save RAM - too chatty
export DXVK_LOG_LEVEL="none"
export WINEDEBUG="-all"

Troubleshooting

• Arbitrary clients crash occasionally: relaunch that account. The game does that, which is why the name is in the window title, to make it easier to spot which account crashed.
• The login screen won't load, some red text about downloading (I think?): update each account by running gw2-alt.sh -u "<name>" "<name 2>" etc, then try launching normally. If one crashes during the update, re-run the update for that one.
• My computer is too slow: reduce graphics settings (and update the stashed GFXSettings.GW2-64.exe.xml), buy more RAM (I think each account requires around 4 G of free RAM), get a CPU with more cores, etc. RAM is often a key bottleneck here. You probably won't be able to run as many accounts in parallel as in Windows, per one early user.
• Something else: check the log file for the account; they often have useful information to diagnose and fix issues.
• Client stuck on Downloading while launching: kill all running clients, all wine processes, all '.exe' processes, etc (ps aux | grep '\.exe\|wine'), then try launching them all again. Please let me know if you know how to prevent this; one user suggested putting sudo before fuse-overlayfs but I have not tested it yet.
• Can't unmount - "Device or resource busy": lsof +D ~/.cache/gw2alts/account-name then start killing things until it is no longer busy.
• Can't kill processes even with kill -9, computer sluggish, lots of disk io (iotop) w/o a process: you probably put the fuse-overlayfs on a different filesystem than the game was installed on. Sadly, you can only wait for the game files to copy over or reboot to interrupt the process.

Core Idea

If you run into trouble, you can see if the basic idea works on your system manually, to see if the core concept is causing trouble or the helpful automation is wrong. The core steps the script does are:

To set up an account:

1. Create upper-account-name and work-account-name directories and run fuse-overlayfs -o lowerdir="$GW2_BASE_WINEPREFIX" -o upperdir="upper-account-name" -o workdir="work-account-name" account-name. This creates a COW clone of the GW2_BASE_WINEPREFIX which should remain tiny - du -sh upper-account-name to find out the true storage used. If it doesn't remain tiny, you may have launched a client without -shareArchive; it also appears putting fuse-overlayfs directories on a different device than the data also causes a full copy.
2. Back up your Local.dat from $GW2_BASE_WINEPREFIX/drive_c/users/$USER/AppData/Roaming/Guild Wars 2/Local.dat, launch the game and set up the alt account the way you want it, copy the new Local.dat file somewhere like account-name.dat and restore your backed up Local.dat file.
3. Do the same for GFXSettings.Gw2-64.exe.xml, found in $GW2_BASE_WINEPREFIX/drive_c/users/$USER/AppData/Roaming/Guild Wars 2/ - back up the original, set up graphics settings for the alts, save the new file elsewhere and restore the original
4. Copy the GFXSettings.Gw2-64.exe.xml to account-name/drive_c/users/$USER/AppData/Roaming/Guild Wars 2/ and account-name.dat file to account-name/drive_c/users/$USER/AppData/Roaming/Guild Wars 2/Local.dat. This overwrites only those files in the COW version of the game directory.
5. Launch the game with your normal command-line launcher script, except change the WINEPREFIX to be account-name instead of $GW2_BASE_WINEPREFIX, and you must pass the -shareArchive flag to GW2 or the game does a deep copy of the install since the game files are opened in exclusive mode. An example command: WINEPREFIX=account-name wine "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/Guild Wars 2/Gw2-64.exe" -shareArchive -windowed

License

This script is licensed under the terms of the WTFPL version 2.

If you submit any pull requests, you agree to license them under the same, to avoid potential legal headaches I'd rather not deal with.