Windower: State of the Project Update! New Plugins!

[nitsuj]

Hey guys!

I know things have been awfully quiet around the FFXI/Windower community lately, but I wanted to take the time to fill everybody in on the state of the Windower project.

Hi, I’m Nitsuj. Some of you might know me, as I’ve been Project Director for about a year now. That basically means I’m the guy to blame that you haven’t seen a new release in a while... But I would just prefer to defer the blame to Hyshio. Can we do that?

I met Azaril in 2009 and began helping him do FFXI-specific code for the on-hiatus Windower v4 Project. V4 is an entire rewrite from scratch of Windower and all the API’s (by Azaril). At this point it’s on hiatus and I keep a regular dialog open with Azaril on whether or not we will be moving to that in the future.

In 2010, Aikar decided to quit FFXI and thus he was no longer able to maintain the Windower codebase. Since v4 wasn’t moving forward, I decided to try to help out in his stead. It was quickly apparent that the project was in chaos, losing the main developer and with the help of Hyshio I put together a new team of developers to whip everything into shape!

THE CURRENT PLAYERS:
Myself (nitsuj) and Invader are now the core developers on the project. Invader came to the project after he reverse engineered Starhawk’s ExpWatch plugin for the level 80 level-cap increase. His skills were apparent and we added him as a plugin developer where he quickly developed the new Exp tracking plugin: Attainment. He’s an opinionated {Bastard Sword} so I decided to let him put his money where his mouth is and promoted him to core developer. He lives close to me IRL so we can actually work together in-person, which is nice.

We have a lot of plugins to maintain, and a lot of new ones to make. Our first new plugin developer is Yekyaa. He had shown amazing ability with his contributions to the FFACETools project, as well as always helping people with custom spellcast scripting. He took over updating the existing plugins as things broke and doing bugfixes and has done an amazing job. Unfortunately, he’s been AFK for real-life reasons but we still hold his spot for him when he returns and wants to do more coding. The latest addition to the team is Aureus. You may know him from his slew of community apps, such as XI-Utils and the excellent FFXIAH tracker app. Aureus’s main job with Windower is new plugins, which we’ll talk about a little later....

Other members of the team include Starhawk (helped us setup the new source control system as well as stays involved with an advisory role), Hyshio (manages the community interaction stuff and acts as liason/producer when Nitsuj doesn’t want to talk to somebody) and I hear rumors of Ragns, Krellion and even Aikar working on stuff in the future...

All seems quiet on the Windower front, but I assure you not a day goes by that we’re not arguing and fighting over new features in IRC and hammering out all the details. We have finished the planning stages for the next major revision (3.5) and have begun coding and refactoring the existing codebase to work towards that goal. 3.5 will include a brand new Launcher Interface that will keep your Windower and plugins up to date, an organized options interface for customizing all the available features and a ton of optimizations, tons of visual and stability improvements and new tools for developers.

New Stuff?
Depending on how active you are on our forums, you may know of a few of these... a few others are brand new today!

Current Windower Version: 3.431
To see your current version, type “about” in the console (without the quotes). If “about” doesn’t work, you have an old version . If it does work, you can see if you have 3.431 or older and know if you should upgrade.

Plugin: Attainment (by Invader)
http://forums.windower.net/topic/197...ns-attainment/
This is the replacement for ExpWatch. It not only tracks exp and merits, but lights in Abyssea among other things. This is updated often. Expwatch is no longer maintained.

Plugin: Find (by Aureus)
http://forums.windower.net/files/file/42-find/
This plugin is used to find where you stored certain things. You can type “//find shihei” and it will tell you where your shihei is located, and how many you have. Super useful. It can also track items on screen (shihei, quick draw cards, ammo etc). See the plugin page for more information.
//find <itemName> to print out locations and counts for a given item.
//track add Shihei: ${INVENTORY:shihei}

Plugin: GearCollector (by Aureus)
http://forums.windower.net/files/file/44-gearcollector/
This is a plugin a lot of people have been waiting for. It will parse your spellcast XML, move all the gear required into inventory and move everything into some form of storage (customizable in settings/gearcollector.xml). We’ve been testing it for a few weeks and it works great.
Be in your mog house
use //gc <job>[/subjob] [group1] [group2] ... [groupN] to start collecting gear.
//gc stop will stop the collection process

Plugin: FFOChat (by Aureus)
http://forums.windower.net/files/file/45-ffochat/
FFOChat is a cross-server chat plugin that uses the FFOChat IRC network. This allows you to chat with anyone else connected to the network, regardless of where in-game you are, or which server you are on.
/<channelNumber> <chatText> to send a message to a channel
/pm <user> <message> to send a private message
//chat join <channelName> to join a new channel
//chat leave <channelNumber to leave a channel

Plugin: Chatlink (by Aureus)
http://forums.windower.net/files/file/43-chatlink/
ChatLink allows you to open URLs from within FFXI. Any detected URLs will appear in your chatlog with a number in brackets before them. You can use:
//clink open <number> - to open that URL directly, or
//clink copy <number> - to copy that URL to your clipboard


As always, you can keep up with our releases on windower.net! I look forward to our team releasing more awesome stuff as we enter this new age of level 99 cap!

- nitsuj

Windower Website/Download: www.windower.net
Plugin Releases/Information: http://forums.windower.net/forum/5-p...datesreleases/
Twitter: www.twitter.com/windower
Hang out with us in IRC: http://ffochat.com/ (#windower)


(In the coming months, we’ll be beginning some early tests of Windower 3.5, so make sure to watch the windower.net forums for sign ups!)

[Ophannus]

When you activate gear collector does it instantly move gear in/out of your inventory? (Since there's like a 2 second delay between pieces to/from inventories, I wonder if it bypasses that) or does it take control of your game and individually sift and shift gear around?

[urat]

Awesome work man! Great to see that the dev team is still hard at work, I'll be waiting in excitement for the new version :D Thanks for all the hard work man!

[nitsuj]

When you activate gear collector does it instantly move gear in/out of your inventory? (Since there's like a 2 second delay between pieces to/from inventories, I wonder if it bypasses that) or does it take control of your game and individually sift and shift gear around?

Gear Collector is packet based, similar to LightLuggage, which means it bypasses keyboard commands. There was an early version that used keyboard input but this version is exponentially faster so we went with this one.

[StateofMind]

Plugin: Find (by Aureus)

[Ophannus]

Gear collector alone is probably the best thing since spellcast and autoexec!

[Corresapolonia]

Gear Collector <3
thank you so much for this.
Lots of time will be saved when changing jobs.

[Julian]

I wish I had anything to contribute/help with.

Also, holy shit, finally an irc plugin. I've only been pestering aikar for one for like... many years now. Any chance on adding support for different networks? >.>;

Keep up the awesome work! :D

[Aureus]

I wish I had anything to contribute/help with.

Also, holy shit, finally an irc plugin. I've only been pestering aikar for one for like... many years now. Any chance on adding support for different networks? >.>;

Keep up the awesome work! :D

Right now it's very feature limited, and locked to FFOChat. It's a possibility for the future though, if there's demand for it.

[Kipling]

That find plugin sounds amazingly brilliant. Thanks for all the hard work.

[Rehwyn]

Been using Find for a few months now and it's fantastic. Need to check out the new GearCollector, since I was using an earlier one apparently that didn't work with my xmls.

[Julian]

Right now it's very feature limited, and locked to FFOChat. It's a possibility for the future though, if there's demand for it.

I love you, and everything you've done so far. Can I have your babies?

[Stromgarde]

I had been using Lootbox Alpha / Altana Cubby, but Find seems so much more elegant to use! Most excellent.

[Sonomaa]

nitsuj trying to keep ragns from updating yarnball, fite teh powa!

[Ragns]

nitsuj y u no answer me

[Foldypaws]

Find is indeed awesome. Is there a way to use Gearcollecter without actually giving spellcast control over anything? Can I *just* make an xml with gearlists and have it use that?

[Aureus]

Find is indeed awesome. Is there a way to use Gearcollecter without actually giving spellcast control over anything? Can I *just* make an xml with gearlists and have it use that?

GC only looks at the group/set definitions. You can indeed make one without rules and have it work fine.

[nitsuj]

nitsuj y u no answer me

Ragns - you've had source control access to yarn ball for a week now, you just haven't came back into IRC to get it... <3

[Yukari]

Question to the folks at windower. When is Attainment going to be updated with CoP Dynamis? Last update I've checked, it still doesn't work there.

[Ragns]

Ragns - you've had source control access to yarn ball for a week now, you just haven't came back into IRC to get it... <3

You're always idle for 9 billion years!