What is Nexus?

Nexus is a real-time addon engine. Providing addon support for Guild Wars 2.

For players

As a user, you just install Nexus and manage everything else from within the game. Discover new addons and install them. Nexus keeps them up-to-date for you.

For developers

As a developer, you are provided an API and framework that handles a lot of the heavy lifting, so you can focus on implementing features.

Features

• Hot-Loading. Addons can be loaded and unloaded without restarting.
• Fully automatic Updates.
• Addon Library. Discover and install new addons.
• Multiboxing compatible.
• Managed Keybinds. Consistent behaviour across addons.
• Extended APIs for easier interfacing with the game.

Is it safe to use?

Based on Guild Wars 2's Third Party Program Policy, this addon-manager should be safe to use.

Nexus does not contain any game-specific logic. By itself, it does nothing. The only interaction with the game is allowing addons to send inputs.

How does it work?

Nexus pretends to be DirectX 11 — the graphics API used by the game — to get loaded and being able to render the overlay.

The reason this method was chosen is simple:
It's less intrusive than a program than runs all the time and injects itself into arbitrary processes. And deinstallation is as simple as removing d3d11.dll again.
Nexus only gets loaded into the game, where it's placed. It's entirely local. Because Windows searches next to the game executable first, before trying to load d3d11.dll from the system folder.

Installation

You can download the DLL here.

Manual Installation (DLL)

1. Download d3d11.dll from the link above.
2. Place it in your GW2 installation folder, next to Gw2-64.exe.
3. Right-click d3d11.dll and open its properties. Near the bottom might be a "Unblock" checkbox. Make sure it's checked, if it's there.

When starting the game you should be greeted with a popup asking you to confirm you understand ArenaNet's stance on third party software.

I already have a D3D11.DLL!

If it's ArcDPS, you can either delete it and reinstall it through Nexus or already move it into <GW2>/addons. Move all its plugins into the addons folder as well.
If it's another D3D11 proxy, rename the existing d3d11.dll to d3d11_chainload.dll and then proceed with Step 2 of the manual installation.

Why not Addon-Loader?

• It is not actively maintained.
• It is widely unsupported.
• It lacks basic features.
• Its baseline installation is so complex, that it requires a separate software just to install correctly.

Why not ArcDPS?

• It is a DPS meter. Other addons should not be loaded through it.
• It frequently breaks with game updates.

Source Code

The Nexus source code is available under https://github.com/RaidcoreGG/Nexus.