You should come to our discord for further help

Hello everyone,

another substantial update to Windower was pushed to live this morning. We have had reports of people being unable to launch FFXI as a result.

Here is the nuclear solution for it:
- go into the Windower folder
- delete windower.exe, hook.dll and the updates folder
- download windower.exe again from https://www.windower.net/
- put it in place of the old one
- log out of all characters, close down FFXI entirely
- relaunch windower

This should solve your issues.

Later today or tomorrow I'll publish a new post with the list of windower updates added to this release.

As usual, this thread is not for discussion or support. Open a separate thread, use one of the other specific threads, or come to windower discord for support.

Thank you and have a nice day!

EDIT: on some systems, it's also possibly needed to update .NET to 4.8. This also applies to Linux/Steamdeck installs.

Windower 4.6 Update

Another Temporary Post

Known issues:

• Some users are having the launcher improperly flagged by Windows as malicious software. Please be patient while we work on a fix.
  

• Binds are currently broken in various funny and unfunny ways. Please be patient while we work on a fix.

• Windower launcher now requires .NET 4.8 (up from 4.5). This may require a manual update especially for linux users

Resolved issues:

• if you crash when launching into the game (after POL), then you probably just need to close all instances of the game and windower before launching new ones.

Thanks for continuing to maintain it after all these years!

Heads up to anyone still using windows 7, windower is going to stop working on your computer soon. They were going to push an update that stopped it working yesterday, but it was delayed

It's coming soon though, need to find a way to block updates so you're allowed to still use your pc I guess.

To de-escalate this a bit, there is no such update planned. We have no plans to break Win 7 support. We will, however, keep developing Windower, and if it turns out that a new feature does not work anymore because Win 7 is no longer being developed, then that will be it. It's the same thing that happened to Win XP, Windower no longer ran on XP after a while, without us even changing anything, simply because the server that hosts all our addons required a newer TLS version which was never implemented on Windows XP.

This can happen on Win 7 at any time. This is not Windower specific, but could absolutely happen with Windower as well. *Everything* on Windows 7 can break at any moment, it's really just a matter of time.

As for Windower, again, we have no plans to break Win 7. If we ever do implement something that breaks Windows 7 compatibility, we will definitely inform people.

Appreciate that, however when I originally asked you gave a reply that was a little more abrupt. I made these posts shortly after.







To be fair it was early in the morning after you put a lot of work in on updates, and you clarified after and in the post above after that you would notify and would try to avoid it if possible. So not taking it too much to heart but the first response wasn't too cool imo.

Nothing he has said is actually inconsistent. Let alone windows 7, Microsoft makes 10 EOL this fall iirc. I've switched to Ubuntu as a result and honestly regret not doing it sooner.

The team is too small to support all the things that go wrong in EOL versions of windows.

A more appropriate response would be to START using the dev build of windower, everything goes to the dev build before it goes live.

if something breaks on dev you can switch to live while it is getting fixed, and as an added bonus we actually know that it broke if more people use it before pushing to live.

And in your case specifically radial, you would see it break on win 7 and then know it is time to wall off your live build.

Blocking updates with a firewall is an option, but we have said multiple times doing so is not supported.

Ok, here's some actual release notes:

Windower 4.6: Apocalyptic Panic Edition

It was an interesting 36 hours.

Addon changes:

• ChatMon and AutoEx have been tweaked to make them more stable and reproduce the old plugin's behaviors more closely.

• Boxdestroyer now updates itself after each patch, so manual updates should be no longer needed. Let us know if it breaks in any way.

• GearSwap: a few minor changes to GearSwap happened. If these words do not mean anything to you, you can disregard this paragraph entirely.
  - GS is now able to recognize when you're trying to trade an item to an NPC versus when you try to use an item on yourself/on someone else.
  - Ranged Attacks now have a `spell.range` field that was previously absent. It's fixed at a value of 25, which is different from other abilities as those have a multiplier value rather than a fixed one.
  - GearSwap will no longer stutter when gaining or losing a bunch of buffs at the same time (like Fenrir's all-stats buff, or getting Impact'd). A weird post-waypoint stutter was also linked to this and was resolved.

• Treasury now has a 'done' command. It does the same thing as the ingame 'Done' menu option in the Treasure Pool.

• EmpyPopTracker now also tracks items in the loot pool.

• Dimmer can now use cumulus masque +1 to warp to Reisenjima.

Plugin changes:

• The FishingCrashFix plugin was removed entirely since it had been obsolete since the pleistocene anyway.

• The Tickle plugin was removed and...

New Addons

• ... a new Tickle addon was added with the same functionality. Please let us know about any issue with it.

• Diagnostics: this is a new addon that is able to report a few known issues that are known to occurr commonly. The addon itself doesn't fix anything on its own, and the text it spews it might not mean anything to you, but it is useful for us when trying to diagnose issues. Hopefully it will make diagnosing simpler!

Core changes:

• Various minor tweaks and bugfixes.

• the command parser has been rewritten to be lighter and more stable. Ironicaly...

WINDOWER: THE UNBOUNDENING

...what happened was that a really sneaky sneaky bug snuck its way into the newly written command parser. The gist of the issue was that the "down" key event was registering as the "up" key event. So the game would perform its native function on key press ("down" event), then perform the windower keybind when releasing the button ("up" event). This also completely destroyed the functionality for those people who were actively using the keyup event. The issue has now been resolved (together with a few others, like case-sensitivity), but please let us know if any breakage still occurs.

A word on automatic updates and the blocking thereof:
Please note that firewalling windower to block updates will mean that the next patch (as I'm writing this, 12th Feb 2025) will break your windower and you'll have to update manually: Gearswap, porterpacker, itemizer, organizer, etc, will all break with the addition of new items, and you won't receive the update, and you will have to update manually. Any client change, you'll have to update manually. Any bug, you'll have to update manually.
And updating manually is a pain in the *** for multiple reasons.

Unless you know for a fact that your client will never change (which is possible if you're playing on a private server with version locked client, for example), blocking windower from updating is a horrible idea, and certainly not a good way to deal with issues such as what happened yesterday.

The best way would be for some of you to start using, here and there, windower dev version, to check if your setup works properly on it, and report any issue. The keybind bug was noticed since late November, but it seemed like a really minor issue because none of us in the development team has setups as complicated and involved as some of you, who were affected the most by the bug, do. Hence why we deemed the update "stable enough". This does not mean switching to windower dev permanently (which we do not recommend), just to keep it in another folder and tweak with it once in a while. This is obviously not obligatory, but until we become billionaires and can afford to hire a QA and Stress Test teams, it's the closest thing to a preventive solution.

To close this already long post, thanks to all the people who helped us debug and locate the various issues. As for the doomsayers, the Apocalypse Patrol, and the PAICTYA (Passive Aggressive I-Can't-Trust-You Association), please remember that we do this out of passion and in our free time. This is not the cop-out answer that you think it is, it's the actual reality of windower. If you don't like it, there are alternatives, and if those alternatives make you happier, please use those. If windower makes you happier than those alternatives, please keep it in mind before coming to attack the very same people who keep it alive.

Thank you all, and have a nice day.

(as usual, this thread is not for support or discussion, so I will prune some of the previous posts and do some thread cleaning for the rest of the day.)

Thank you and all the people working on it for the labor of love that is Windower!

Not sure how I would function in the game without it. Thank you all as well for addressing the bug and writing this up for transparency. It is greatly appreciated by the vast majority of the community!

Oh my word is this why I've been doing a weird time freeze after warping in Sortie?

Can't say for sure, but it's very likely.
Basically what happens here is that if you use a same-zone warp, then gain or lose a buff, the server sends your client a packet with *all* your buff expiration timestamps - a sort of "ok let's make sure we're synced" mechanism.

This packet triggers the buff_refresh() event within gearswap, once per buff refreshed. The problem was, previously gearswap would refresh its internal variables (stuff like player.mp, player.buffactive, etc etc) every time the buff_refresh() event fired, and for no reason since all those refreshes were triggered by a single packet and thus player status could not have changed between each event.

Refreshing globals is a very, very expensive operation in terms of processing power, and triggering it multiple times in a row causes stutter. This is particularly problematic in Sortie and Ody where you easily have 20-30 buffs active at a given time, so warp -> receive Invisible -> refresh globals times twenty in a single packet -> ST-T-T-T-T-TUTTER.

Gearswap now properly refreshes global variables only once, when appropriate, thus the megastutter is avoided. This doesn't prevent the various gearswap suites around from being silly on their own, but reduces the issue significantly in general.

Pretty sure that stutter is gone, thank you very much.