Complete GW.dat file download

DZwart

DZwart

Legacy of Elijah Officer
I don't remember who told me about this on alliance chat, but it worked great. Just remember to pick an off-peak time to avoid too much pressure on the GW servers. It came up after loading that HUGE update last week that it was taking so long to load on initial logon. Someone in alliance chat told me that if you make a shortcut to the GW.exe file and edit the target tag, you can force the client to download the ENTIRE game data file. My GW.dat file is now 5.54GB and I haven't had to load (still have to connect) going into any zone since then. Any future updates will change that, but still, it helps, especially with all the upcoming new zones that I think may have been added to the available image already.

What you do, is edit the shortcut on the "Target" line, change the text from:

"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\GW.exe"
Click to expand...

to

"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\GW.exe" -image
Click to expand...

This shortcut will actually force the entire download, but will not actually start the game. I started this during a lunch break and it was just finishing up when I got home from work (ran it on 2 computers at the same time and got total of about 40kb/s).

You can also add other tags to do other things:
  • -perf = adds performance stats at the top of the game screen/window when running the game
  • -diag = creates a diagnostic file - not sure what to do with it, but saw it somewhere
  • There is another set for (I think -email and -password) that you can use if you want to login without typing password, although I don't feel comfortable leaving my password available on the computer.
 
o_O wow. I'm doing it now, my game is fully upto date and doing this it needs 40k more files to dl and decompress. I'll post how much data is needed to be downloaded when I finish.
 
I knew about the -password one. (I use it, cause the only other person who has access to my comp, and would know what to do with GW is my brother, and he already knows the PW anyway. :) )

But that's pretty cool. I might have to check out the -perf one too...

EDIT: Oh, also, another thing I've found, is that if you store your up-to-date GW.dat file on something like your iPod (actually, haven't tried it with my iPod yet, did it with a Creative mp3 player...), you can take it with you somewhere to another computer, download just the client from guildwars.com (or take that with you too), transfer the .dat file to the directory, and you've got a working, up-to-date copy of GW running on that computer.
 
Yep, I always do that, have the .dat file on my file server and mp3 player. For me that update was 40k files at 450 megs, my .dat is 2.8gigs right now, I think i need to uncompress some more :D
 
What about going the opposite direction? Any of you guys know any way of *removing* files from the GW.dat file? I want to try and free up some space on my hard drive so that the gw.dat file will actually defrag properly, but I'm having problems finding the room.

If I could remove assets from previous areas of the game that I'll never go back to, or won't be going back to for awhile, that would help give me some more space. :p
 
I intend to download the full client at some point...for the main computer. The dungeon computer is too low on hard drive space for that. :(

So thanks, y'all.
 
you could probably squeeze it into <4gb with bzip or 7zip.

Its a pain to compress things in windows tho. out of the box no realy useful archiving tools are available...

Winrar might beable to squeeze it down to size, no real guarantees, and the trial version is archaic.

you could always get tar for windows and compress it using tar cjf gw.tar.bz gw.dat, burn it to a cd then uncompress on another maching using tar xjf gw.tar.bz

while your at it you could throw the exe and the index file in there also
 
At some point in your life you have to stop staring outside the window of not understanding and open the door to learning.
 
oh please your just on here to not learn about writing a paper.


Got ya :p
 
Compressing the .dat with winrar on max compression doesnt compress it at all. I just tried it. I'm sure trying to Tar ball it wont either.

Just gonna have to put it on a dvd, a large flash drive or mp3 player if you wanna transport it around
 
bzip will definately compress it, it compresses everything :p

bzip usually hits the <50% of original file size, gz usually hits <70%, rar I dont know about, its proprietary, so I sorta ignore it to avoid liscenses.
 
Tar balling the gw.dat didnt compress it much at all. Only 50 megs from the original size.
 
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