Testing Windower - How You Can Help

Lately we had some stability issues with Windower. These were mostly caused by a lack of in-depth testing. Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to change that. Our solution, over a decade ago, was to crowdsource testing by having a development branch of Windower, that we publish updates to first. We hope that people play on it, to report issues early, before we push those changes out to the public. However, it was hard to switch to the development branch, and even harder to switch back to the stable branch, which lead to few people being interested in helping us test.

With yesterday's udpate, we changed how that works, and it's now much easier to switch to the development branch, and to switch back again. The only drawback is that you have to log out on all characters to make the switch. It's not possible to run the stable and development branches side-by-side (unless you use different folders, but then you need to synchronize your plugin and addon settings between both folders somehow). If you're interested in helping us test new features and bug fixes, we'd appreciate it if you could play on the development build.

How to enable it:
1. Log out on all characters.
2. Go to your Windower folder
3. Open the `settings.xml`
4. Set the branch setting to `dev`, i.e. change `<branch>stable</branch>` to `<branch>dev</branch>`
5. Relaunch

To switch back, simply change the setting back from `dev` to `stable`. Alternatively remove the `<branch>` line entirely, it will revert back to stable on the next launch.

Thank you for stickying this. There is no chance this would have made it into my long term.

Is there a new version to test right now? Is there a good way to know when you'd like help testing or would it be helpful if we just left ourselves in dev? Will we have to make this swap every patch day?

Thank you

We occasionally post specific things to test in our Discord server. For larger updates I think it makes sense to also post on here, I'll try to do that in the future. If you're in our Discord server, you can use the /status command to check if the stable branch (we call it "live") and the development branch ("dev") are out of sync.

FFXI updates shouldn't really affect it much, since we generally don't need to update Windower anymore after a FFXI patch, except for a resource update, which is non-critical and can be done while other FFXI instances are running.

For people interested in helping out, I recommend full-timing it until something breaks, then switching to stable for the time being. There is *very* little risk of it breaking unexpectedly in the middle of an event. Either you notice something's *** shortly after you log in, or it's safe to use. While there's a non-zero chance of it breaking during an event, it is, in my opinion, hardly worth worrying about. But that's an assessment you need to make, I can't give you a precise percentage.

Another thing to mention, it's only worth using the dev build *if you're willing to report issues*. If you don't post on here or our Discord, or can't tell it to someone else who does, there's really no point in using it.