Windower Crashing After 8/11 Update

We are getting some reports in our discord about people having alt boxes crashing on launch.

a few people have narrowed down the issue to these settings
If your experiencing issues try removing those setting from your profile
If this does not fix your issue please let us know.

We are still looking into the issue.

This game won’t collapse at the lack of content. This game will collapse when people like you leave and stop solving these sorts of issues.

Thanks for doing this.

Windower just as spaghetti as ffxi if those settings are causing crashes across processes.

Can you elaborate on that? my understanding is people are only seeing issues launching under the profiles with the sound disabled, not that is causing all instances to crash when you launch with "bad" profile.

its working, thanks alot for fixing this <3

Why do you hate spaghetti, are you bigoted against Italians or something?

I for one welcome our spaghetti overlords.

One of the best dishes on the planet, Crusted Chicken Romano, Cheese Cake Factory, involves Spaghetti.



@Rips 100% big kudos to the team for their support!

This is the most ungrateful post ever lol where's the spongebob meme

if you've been a dev long enough you come to realize all code is spaghetti code

I am having the issue, but I never touched my sound settings. I just use a default profile in Windower and Sound is set to "on" and Always Play Sound is also set to On.

The error message references luacore.dll (I am on a different machine but will add my crash report once I get back to that one), hoping that will help you.

EDIT:

Confirmed error does not occur when logging in vanilla, only with Windower4.

Crash report from Windows:

Faulting application name: pol.exe, version: 1.18.13.0, time stamp: 0x4e3bcddc
Faulting module name: luacore.DLL, version: 2.3.0.5, time stamp: 0x60de075c
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0005c41b
Faulting process id: 0x2f80
Faulting application start time: 0x01d78ec966f7d869
Faulting application path: D:\PlayOnline\SquareEnix\PlayOnlineViewer\pol.exe



Faulting module path: C:\Users\Brian\Desktop\WIndower\plugins\luacore.DLL
Report Id: 72db9fcf-1893-4fd9-947b-03306c925351
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

List of addons you use? currently, we have a report that states "shortcuts" seems to be causing issues.

Edit: issue is more related to any addon with settings for players experiencing this issue.

I drew this list from the Settings.xml file in my base Windower4 directory. If there is a preferred alternative way to list them, please let me know. There are some other Add-ons I use that I manually launch on an 'as-needed' basis, but they would not be coming up automatically.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<settings>
<autoload>
<addon>aecho</addon>
<addon>autojoin</addon>
<addon>checkparam</addon>
<addon>ConsoleBG</addon>
<addon>DistancePlus</addon>
<addon>findAll</addon>
<addon>GearSwap</addon>
<addon>instaLS</addon>
<addon>PetTP</addon>
<addon>pointwatch</addon>
<addon>Pouches</addon>
<addon>timestamp</addon>
<addon>TParty</addon>
<addon>Trusts</addon>
<addon>update</addon>
<addon>SpellCheck</addon>
<addon>DressUp</addon>
<addon>zonetimer</addon>
<addon>azureSets</addon>
<addon>Omen</addon>
<addon>boxdestroyer</addon>
<addon>Debuffed</addon>
<addon>itemizer</addon>
<addon>MyHome</addon>
<addon>scoreboard</addon>
<addon>EmpyPopTracker</addon>
<addon>equipviewer</addon>
<addon>battlemod</addon>
<plugin>Timers</plugin>
<plugin>FFXIDB</plugin>
<plugin>Guildwork</plugin>
</autoload>
<profile name="">
<consolekey>Insert</consolekey>
<uiscale>1</uiscale>
</profile>
</settings>

I had the same problem this morning, crashing pol just as "Downloading Data" came into view, Event viewer showed:
Faulting module path: C:\Users\NCC1701\WIndower\plugins\luacore.DLL

Following OP, I enabled sound and all is now well.
Thanks much.

Just to clarify, when talking about enabling/disabling sound:

The area I am looking to see those settings is:

Launch Windower > "Edit" icon at bottom for profiles (in my case there is only the Default Profile) > Game tab > Sound and Always Play Sound (both set to On, I have never touched those settings).

if your getting to the character select screen than this is a "different" issue than the sound one.

That's definitely correct, I get all the way to Character Select, I choose my character, I see the usual POL messages about Lobby, etc., then the screen goes dark (as normal) and I see *** Downloading Data *** and that's when the crash hits.

I checked through the Windows event viewer entries for the crash, but found nothing beyond POL.exe being the faulting application and the faulting module path being \WIndower\plugins\luacore.DLL

If there is any additional information or testing on my end that I can provide, please let me know. And thank you for all your work on this and on Windower in general.

EDIT: After reading an above post, I checked Super Sampling as well, but it is currently (and has always been) set to OFF as well.

if you can launch with no addons loaded and see which ones make you crash verses which opens don't that could be helpful, so far we might believe "send" doesnt but most others do pointing to some issue with loading settings files.

Okay - I turned off all plugins and all addons, and was able to log in. I will go about activating them one at a time and seeing what happens.

First will be loading them all while in-game one at a time, and if there is no reaction to that, I will try disabling all and logging in after enabling them at the Windower start one at a time.

EDIT:

The very first thing I did was //lua load aecho. It immediately crashed POL. I will log back in and try a different one to see if it's just aecho, or just any add-on.

EDIT v2:

I tried loading the two Plug-Ins that I still use (FFXIDB and Guildwork), they do NOT cause a crash. I am going to start with the add-ons down my list and test that.

EDIT the 3rd:

Confirmed the two Plug-Ins are not responsible, but after loading them, I tried loading "autojoin". Immediate crash.

Please try with the "send" addon in particular, if you can.

I had the same issue as above. Before update I had sound off, super sampling on, and used shortcuts, so that's three possible issues. I narrowed it down to the sound settings. Supersampling and shortcuts works fine.

I actually never used the Send add-on, but for the purposes of testing I have enabled it. I initially set it to "Off" to log in, then enabled in while in-game.

Send did NOT crash the game. To be clear, I had never used it before so I had enabled it for the first time just now.

I logged out and back onto a different character on the same account, still works.

I shut down and started from scratch with Send enabled at the beginning (and disabled the two plug-ins as well), and again FFXI loaded up without incident.

I then disabled Send and loaded Gearswap from the console - immediate hang and crash.

So my summary of what I've seen so far:

Three of the add-ons I've tested that I was previously using (AEcho, Autojoin, Gearswap), cause a crash whether I have them pre-loaded, or if I load them in-game with the console.

One add-on that I had never used/enabled before (Send), does not cause the crash.

Neither of the two plug-ins I still use (FFXIDB, Guildwork) cause a crash.

EDIT: I have also never used the Shortcuts add-on.

EDIT 2: I enabled Shortcuts for the first time just to test that. The very first time, I logged in with it chosen but disabled. I enabled it from the console and POL crashed. However, in subsequent attempts, I got no crash from Shortcuts. I logged in with it active all the way, and it was fine - I repeatedly disabled/enabled it from the console and it's fine. Only the very first 'enable from console' caused a crash.

I've found several others that do NOT crash me, and that is DressUp and ConsoleBG. So far Send, Shortcuts and those two do not crash me.

Aecho, Autojoin, Gearswap, Findall, all do. I am going to try each one on my original list to see what is good and what is not.

Hi, one of the Windower Dev helpers here.
Would like a few of you experiencing the "I crash when I login" to try something.
1) install `eval` in the windower launcher
2) fire up the game, and before logging in, open up console (`insert` key by default) unload addons and plugins with these two commands
```
unloadall
lua unloadall
```
3) log in to the game
4) load eval `lua load eval`
5) then do `eval windower.ffxi.get_info()`
report if you crashed from that or not, and what server you're on (if you're comfortable sharing that and its not on your profile)
edit: oh and if you don't crash, can try `eval print(windower.ffxi.get_info().server)` and let us know if you get a `0` in console or not

I have Sound and always sound both "OFF"

I can log-in with All usual plugin enabled , but all addons turned off

most addon I try to load in-game or before logging will crash FFXI as I enter "Downloading Data..."

One note before I do that,

So I went through and I tested *every* add-on in my list above, loading them from the console while in-game. (The only one that was pre-loaded was Send, which did not crash me.)

As I mentioned, I crashed the first time I launched Shortcuts from the console (I had activated but turned it off from the start screen of Windower). But subsequent loads or turning-on failed to crash me.

I then went through my list and none of these crashed me:

ConsoleBG, Dressup, DistancePlus, instaLS, PetTP, Pointwatch, Pouches, TimeStamp, TParty, Trusts, Update, Spellcheck, ZoneTimer, AzureSets, Omen, BoxDestroyer, Debuffed, Itemizer, MyHome, Scoreboard, EmpyPopTracker, EquipViewer, Battlemod

I then console-loaded the ones that HAD crashed me: AEcho, Autojoin and Gearswap - that did NOT crash me.

However, while I was in the process of writing this post, I turned my head back and it had crashed again. This time, the faulting module path was Windower\Hook.dll (all previous times it was plugins\luacore.dll

I launched again with only Shortcuts enabled, no errors. I tried to console enable AEcho... and it crashed, faulting luacore.dll again.

I will do what Rubenator requested next to test that.

Okay, here is the sequence I took:

1) After selecting(but disabling) Eval in the add-ons list, I logged in (only one add-on, Shortcuts, was enabled, no plug-ins)
2) I ran the commands to unload all plugins and all add-ons
3) I loaded Evail from the console (this did not cause a crash)
4) I ran the command eval windower.ffxi.get_info() and that DID cause a crash. (Faulting module was Windower\Plugins\luacore.dll

My server is Ragnarok.

EDIT: Did this twice just to be sure. I also tried on a separate attempt just to run the second eval command and it also crashed.

There is also inconsistency - previously I noted that I could enable (for example) Dressup and it didn't crash me. But this last time, it did. But on the very next attempt, I enabled Dressup from the Add-Ons list at the start of WIndower... and I logged in fine.

I am going to try loading all my original add-ons from the WIndower startup screen ,and see if they log in now. EDIT: It crashed with them all re-enabled. Currently I am logged in with no plug-ins and no add-ons enabled.

I put my settings back to the state they were when I was having issues. My issue turned out to be the sound settings in Windower. I was able to get passed the character selection screen whereas before it would crash on downloading content. I did in fact crash once I entered the 'eval windower.ffxi.get_info()' command.

When you redo your fix does it crash with that command? @Blindphleb

It does not crash after enabling sound and entering that command. I followed up with the print(windower.ffxi.get_info().server) command and it prints 21.

Mkay, that's, pretty weird. We will be pushing out a bandaid for it soon and will be interested to know if it lets you put your sound settings back. I'll post again when its ready.

Oh actually that was fast. Its live now so. Close all instances of FFXI/POL/Windower and try again.