Feedback:Game updates/20240905

Update -- September 5, 2024

• Added a new game client command line option "-stress <n>"
  • <n> is the time to run a stress test in milliseconds.
  • The test will run for <n> milliseconds each frame.
  • The stress test runs during loading screens and NOT while the game is running.
  • -stress without a numeric argument is the same as -stress 0, which does no stress testing.
  • -stress 10 is not particularly noticeable in terms of visibly slowing down the loading screen.
  • -stress 100 will make your loading screen update at 10 fps as it spends 100 ms each frame doing the test.
  • -stress 1000 will make your loading screen update at 1 fps.
  • -stress 10000 will make your loading screen update at 0.1 fps.
  • If the test fails, it will display a dialog box with this text: "Guild Wars detected a possible hardware malfunction. This may be due to a faulty or overheating processor or memory chip. The application will now terminate." Your only choice is "OK".

This code was a part of the game until 2018. It was originally put in because a long time ago, some new vendors got into the x86 processor business, and some of their CPU chips and/or motherboards were not stable. We removed this code because it slowed the game down when loading or minimized for no apparent benefit. Chip stability was fine, we thought, until just recently when we've had reports of some chips having stability errors. This might help diagnose those problems.