PlayOnline help

[Vlorsutes]

My friend recently ran into a series of problems and asked if I could help, so I thought it best to post it up on here and see if anyone had any valuable advice to give.

"I seem to be able to hear music in-game fine, but I can't hear any sound effects, like footsteps or sword swipes. Would anyone happen to know what the problem might be?

This may or may not be related, but I recently updated XP to Vista because competing for bandwidth with the other two cpus in the house that were running on Vista left me getting disconnected whenever I decided to multitask anything online. I also seem to have a SUPER hard time trying to log into the game itself; getting errors such as POL-0011 and POL-1160 (these also occurred while I was on XP), if I remember right, in when logging into PlayOnline. I thought updating my POL to the Vista version would be a good idea, but that still wouldn't explain why I'm getting the same error as I did before Vista."

"After hitting "retry" on those error windows, eventually, I can get into FFXI and I can play the game just fine - but without sound."

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance.

[SephYuyX]

Is the sound effects volume on in FFXI >.>?

[Vlorsutes]

Yes, I had her check that first to make sure that it wasn't something as simple as that. Both the sound effects and the music are at full volume.

[SephYuyX]

I seem to recall a registry value or POL option that mutes sfx, but im not sure, as Ive never used POL on Vista.

It's also pretty likely that Vista and POL arent getting along.
Did she do an in place upgrade? Or was it a complete format/install?

If she did an in place, id say the move from xp > vista screwed something up, and reinstalling pol/ffxi sounds like a good idea. And when I mean reinstall pol/ffxi, I mean completly erase everything and start anew, dont carry any dats or regs files over, just go through the whole painful install.

That means install Vista POL, update, install FFXI/RoZ, update, install CoP, update, install ToAU, update, install WotG, update. And see if that works.

Those two POL errors are network related, and not necessarily SEs fault. If shes always have problems within the house too, thats a sign of a poor network setup (or could just be a bad router/modem) or the ISP is crap. She can try to forward FFXI ports on the router, and also to call the ISP and make sure they arent blocking FFXI ports, or doing anything else stupid, call for an ISP tech guy to come out and look at the connection for free.

[Kohan]

Changing the operating system won't help with being kicked offline due to 'net usage, so I'm not quite sure why they did that. It's a pity they did, since there's not really any reason to be on Vista over XP. Most likely, FFXI's traffic is being dropped off by an overwhelmed router, and the quickest, easiest way to fix this is to make their PC -- the one using FFXI, that is -- the DMZ Host. They can do this in their router's advanced settings.

Now, this will make the computer more vulnerable to hacking threats and what not, but since the average person A) doesn't really need to worry about that, and B) should have at least Windows Firewall and an anti-virus program running, they should be fine. Not good to be reckless, terrible to be paranoid.

The other -- and more specific -- option is to forward a huge range of ports for FFXI, but to be quite honest, the range is so large that they may as well go the DMZ Host route. They'll also want to set up a static IP on their computer in order to do this (as without it, this won't work). To modify the DMZ Host setting, they'll need to get into their router's configuration, and they can find out how by looking online and/or in the manual it came with.

PortForward.com - Static IP Setup

PortForward.com - Free Help Setting up Your Router or Firewall