Windower 4 - Discussion and Support

[Sechs]

That never happened to me, but lately I got my moogle to appear between Courier's Coalition and the warp thing by the fountain. It stays there some time, I can interact with it and swap jobs, and after a while it disappears :D

(it used to happen in Lower Jeuno too, in front of the Tenshodo door, lol)

[Mafai]

All the chat log issues should be resolved now. If you are in game you will need to relog, hook was pushed like 12-15 hours ago.

[Dew]

Has Polutils been fixed to read the weapon dat also? Not sure where to post it, but was mentioned earlier in this thread it was being worked on.

[Arcon]

Has Polutils been fixed to read the weapon dat also? Not sure where to post it, but was mentioned earlier in this thread it was being worked on.

I fixed it a while ago, but never made it public, I'll push it out when I get home.

[Sechs]

Together with the Timers update? /starryeyes

[solkanar]

Treasury stopped working yesterday. I double checked and verified that auto drop was enabled and the items i didn't want were on the pass list in settings but it is no longer dropping anything. Think this happened with an update when i launched windower sometime around 11p est on 12/19

[Sechs]

Byrth I know you're the last one who updated Scoreboard.
I noticed today a bug with how automaton gets calculated.
Its damage was split in two. "Bambino" and "Bambino (Sec.)" (which stands for "Sechs" I guess?).
I was using Valoredge, so no ranged damage. Guess it splits melee damage from WS damage?

[Byrthnoth]

The latentchecker and setBGM (VanaTunes replacement) addons are now live.

I'll look in to scoreboard's issues.

[Draylo]

setBGM can only be used in mog house?

[Arcon]

Treasury stopped working yesterday. I double checked and verified that auto drop was enabled and the items i didn't want were on the pass list in settings but it is no longer dropping anything. Think this happened with an update when i launched windower sometime around 11p est on 12/19

I already replied to you on the Windower forums, but I'll say it here again just so people notice:
Treasury was adjusted to not auto-drop items on the pass list anymore. Instead there's a new drop list which contains items that will be auto-dropped (and auto-passed). You can simply copy the entire item list from your pass list and paste it into your drop list in the settings file (Windower/addons/Treasury/data/settings.xml). This was a requested feature, since it's now possible to only pass certain items that appear in the treasury pool without dropping items that you already have in the inventory (for example when farming -1 items in Dynamis). I'll also add an option to auto-pass on rare items immediately if the item is already in the inventory, although I recommend being careful with that option, as there can be situations when you don't want that (like keeping a rare item in the pool that you already possess until a friend zones in), so you'll have to be careful with that option and keep it in mind.

setBGM can only be used in mog house?

For now, it's being looked into whether or not it could be amended to work anywhere.

[Arcon]

setBGM can only be used in mog house?

For now, it's being looked into whether or not it could be amended to work anywhere.

Looks good, apparently it can be used outside of MH as well (at least to some degree). We'll try to adjust that addon soon to incorporate that.

[solkanar]

Thanks for clarifying Acorn, working just fine the new way.

[Trumpy]

Just updated Windower and did you guys know the addon tab now has just the addon name and the on/off button? Theres no descriptions nor links for support/about/author.

[Arcon]

Interesting, I didn't check that screen in ages.... not sure what's going on there, I'll open an issue for that.

[Sechs]

I can confirm that, just noticed (and also just noticed a plethora of new addons I never saw there before!)

Acorn, I was wondering what's the status on Windower5? Still going to happen sometimes in the future or did you guys decide to keep furtherly developing Windower4?

[Trumpy]

Granted my sub ended like the 9th of this month so I havent been checkin the addon tab since then really, well maybe a week or so ago i checked it. I was just like hmm this is weird! theres always new plugins and addons poppin in now and then so I try to check it everytime i open launcher. especially if i notice extracting addons when it is loading up.

[Loire]

Is there any way to forcibly stop the windower launch for making registry edits when loading up with a profile. Specifically the supersampling section. Having it off, it always updates it exactly to the foreground res even if you change values manually yourself with regedit. Or do I need to be doing this manually after the launcher but before the actual game loads everytime.

[Mafai]

I can confirm that, just noticed (and also just noticed a plethora of new addons I never saw there before!)

Acorn, I was wondering what's the status on Windower5? Still going to happen sometimes in the future or did you guys decide to keep furtherly developing Windower4?

Arcon and Iryoku are still working on it. As far as what is done I can't comment on, but I have been seeing them speak about it in the dev IRC. One cool feature that I know it includes is building crash dumps automatically for when we run into issues that people can provide.

Is there any way to forcibly stop the windower launch for making registry edits when loading up with a profile. Specifically the supersampling section. Having it off, it always updates it exactly to the foreground res even if you change values manually yourself with regedit. Or do I need to be doing this manually after the launcher but before the actual game loads everytime.

You could make a .reg file that you just run after launcher to make this easier.

[Loire]

Arcon and Iryoku are still working on it. As far as what is done I can't comment on, but I have been seeing them speak about it in the dev IRC. One cool feature that I know it includes is building crash dumps automatically for when we run into issues that people can provide.



You could make a .reg file that you just run after launcher to make this easier.

Aye, have one leftover from before the profiles on the launcher were as robust. Been trying to troubleshoot a display driver crash I get with duo/tri/quad instancing ffxi which I cannot replicate on vanilla FFXI for the past three years.

[Arcon]

Acorn, I was wondering what's the status on Windower5? Still going to happen sometimes in the future or did you guys decide to keep furtherly developing Windower4?

It's being actively developed, but slowly. Iryoku is currently working on it alone, I still have a huge list of issues for Windower 4 and related projects that I need to work on (Resource extraction, FFXIDB, addon API/libs, etc.), so I don't get to help out there much for now, but it is coming along pretty nicely. The Lua C++ framework Iryoku is working on is probably one of the best in existence at this point (wouldn't surprise me if it was the best since Lua people generally don't seem to know what they're doing). We also had CeGUI working at some point, but decided to go the GWEN route instead, which will take more time but should yield better results, since CeGUI was a pain to work with and progress was slow.

It already surpasses Windower 4 in many respects:

• Speed: Windower 4 uses some decade old and awful code, and despite their enthusiasm there were some less than qualified programmers working on it in the past, resulting in just stupid and redundant code that did a lot more than it should. Also, we use LuaJIT instead of stock Lua 5.1 for addons, which is magnitudes faster.
• Stability: The Lua API should ideally never crash or get into an unrecoverable state. Implementing this alone took weeks, but poor Iryoku is apparently bored enough to not have anything better to do. Lucky for the entire FFXI community!
• Error handling: If it does ever crash, error reporting will be amazingly detailed, even inside Lua. No more digging around in disassembly for weeks collecting dozens of crash dumps and handing out several versions of debug builds to figure out what went wrong. Just think of what we went through with Timers…
• C++ API: While we're not sure whether we'll make the C++ API open (the option is still being discussed) it will be much better designed than the mess that is the Windower 4 plugin API. Also, the Lua C++ wrapper is, like I said, nothing short of amazing. That means developing in C++ will be a lot easier, faster and safer than it is in Windower 4.
• Proper GUI: Instead of abusing text primitives like aligning them in a certain way and formatting them individually you'll be able to make proper GUIs using pre-defined elements (like buttons, check/radio boxes, etc.). It might be possible to provide custom skins for those as well, but I'm not sure about that yet.
• Memory: Currently all addons have to copy the resources when they use them, which can bloat their size up significantly (including the item resources alone costs over 20MB per addon). This will be shared across all addons, as such only one copy of the resources needs to be loaded. This can reduce the POL process size by hundreds of MB.

What's still missing though is the entire Lua API. Once that is added, it will be pretty much release-ready. Although we will probably be working on a translation layer between the Windower 4 Lua API and the new Windower 5 Lua API (since the v5 API will be entirely different). That will make all (or at least most) Windower 4 addons run on Windower 5 as well, despite a drastically different API.

For non-programmers, an API is essentially the set of variables and functions we allow Lua scripts to use. Both the amount, names and design of those will be entirely different than what they are on Windower 4. Here is a small Lua code example from Windower 4:

windower.register_event('incoming chunk', some_function)

This executes some_function every time a packet comes in. On Windower 5 it might look something like this (like I said, it's not finalized yet):

events.incoming_chunk:add(some_function)

While previously all Windower-related code was inside the "windower" table (as in the above example with register_event), we will structure it differently now. Hence v4 addons won't natively work on v5, but with a translation layer it should be possible by including this at the top of each addon:

windower = require('v4')

This is just a quick overview, once we start working on the addon API we can give more details, and like I said, at that point it will be essentially finished, or at least ready to be tested (there are still some things like the updating mechanism and startup options that we need to implement, but they should be somewhat fast in comparison). I'll let you know when the time comes.