Greetings, adventurers. Windower team here!

Welcome to the "Windower v4 - Dev Tracker" thread.
While Windower v5 is on the horizon, Windower v4 is still very much actively mantained, but after the closure of windower forums there hasn't been a central hub to announce all the updates to Windower itself and its collection of addons and plugins.
This thread is now going to be that place.

What is Windower?

For those who may be new here - hey, don't laugh, there's still returners and new player joining the game - Windower is a powerful third-party launcher and enhancement tool for Final Fantasy XI, able to provide a variety of features, plugins, and addons that enhance gameplay, add features to the game interface, and generally make life in Vana'diel more enjoyable.

I'm not sure I get it really

The Windower Experience is composed of three parts:

- The Launcher: this is Windower itself, launches the game for you, lets you launch more than one instance of FFXI at once, lets you use Addons and Plugins, lets you save configuration Profiles, and so on.

- Addons: written in Lua, open source, take advantage of the Windower Lua API, and are the main providers of additional functionality to FFXI. Windower hosts a number of "official addons" that are downloadable directly from the launcher itself. At the same time, there's an endless supply of unofficial addons, written by third-party developers, that can be found by searching the internet. Many have dedicated threads here on FFXIAH itself.

- Plugins: closed-source and only available in .dll format, they provide functionalities that cannot be provided through the Windower Lua API. Nowadays most plugins have an equivalent addon that provides the same features, but there's a few notable exceptions.

I'm still confus D:

This thread is not the place for bug reports, feature suggestions, FAQs, explanations, clarifications, etc, so if you still have doubts here's a few places where you can continue learning about Windower, or request support with whatever issue you might have:

Windower Official Website
Windower GitHub
Windower Discord

Feel free to click on these links in-depth information and support. Now, I don't know how to finish this post, but I believe the last sentence should be something like this:

Enjoy your time in Vana'diel!

Sincerely,
- the Windower Dev Team

A few of the latest changes, as an example of what this thread is for:

Addons:
- Itemizer: by default, the addon will now stack the destination bag if it detects that you moved a partial stack of a stackable item. In other words: if your case contains 45 plutons, and you move 30 more into it, itemizer will stack them together. This behavior can be turned off (//itemizer as), or invoked manually (//stack)
- Gearswap: fixed a bug that appeared when unloading a job profile with a bad file_unload() function.
- Setbgm: added a //setbgm find <name> command that lets you search songs by name. Any partial string works (e.g.: //setbgm find memor).
- Setbgm: added a "No Music" song with ID 0 (e.g.: //setbgm 0), it functionally lets you turn off music for the given type
- Pointwatch: fixed an issue that made PointWatch not save settings passed to it ingame (e.g.: //pv pos 0 0 would correctly move the addon to the given position, but not save the new value)

Plugins:
- Timers: added correct timers to songs sung with Loughashade; fixed duration of some SMN buffs.

Thank you for your hard work and dedication to this - Without Windower I might not even play ffxi

Known Issues (Nov 2023)

Hey all, quick post to share with everybody that we know organizer does not work, invtracker returns errors, porter and porterpacker choke, and that in general the new items and debuffs are not parseable lua-side. Selindrile's gearswap suite is especially affected.

Basically, SE introduced a bug with the latest patch that makes all Storage Slip past 20 appear as just "." in your inventory. For this reason we haven't pushed the updated resource files to windower.

We're waiting for SE to fix the Storage Slips bug before pushing new resources, which will fix most of the errors everyone is having.

Please look forward to it™ and We appreciate your patience™

OK, glad it wasn't just me, I saw the storage slip thing and was like WTF man?

How did organizer break? Unless I'm not using it to its full potential, mine has been working fine. But I dont have extra wardrobes and I dont use storage slips for my active jobs.

It will work fine until you get a new item that is not in windower's resources, like an impish box.

Do you have any of the new items? Chocobo chair, the adamantite body, impish box etc. all *** with many lua functions if you have them in your inventory. Most of the luas scan your inventory and have no idea what the *** the new items are since they aren't defined in them and it will break a lot of functions and/or just constantly spit out errors.

Nothing you can do about the *** KI chair, but you can put the others in your sack, storage etc. and it will be fine. Just keep it out of inventory and wardrobes.

i threw together a corrected dat in case SE continues to drag their feet on it:
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/57561/storage-slip-dat-mod/#3683675

People, let's be tidy and please let's keep this thread clean for windower updates and the discussion of windower updates.

For discussions about windower bugs and code development you're welcome to come and ask in the windower discord, or to open a new thread in the appropriate forum section. For discussion about game bugs I don't know where you want to go but please not in here.

Thanks.


Thanks Thorny, this will definitely come in handy as SE doesn't seem to be too bothered by the bug - maybe because it's only visual?

Regardless, we're updating windower resources manually so addons stop erroring, please look forward to itTM.

Windower Resources have been updated!

The new buffs and items should no longer cause any errors. Just reload windower then reload all addons (or close and reopen FFXI) to get the update.

The slips are still broken, use Thorny's custom DAT until SE gets their slips together: https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/57561/storage-slip-dat-mod/#3683675

There was a small hiccup in the pushing of new resources. Now they're published. If you have been getting errors between my previous message and this one, just relaunch windower and it'll be fixed.

Windower Dev is broken!

We know. We're working on it. Give us some time. In the meantime, backup your addons folder then use Windower Stable version.

The issue is resolved. Carry on everyone!

Is the new gamepad button not working going to be fixed or is it a big deal to do?

It's being worked on, but the way SE made it work is dumb so the fix is going take a while. EventuallyTM.

Odds for windower v5 or gamepad fix happening first? :D

Known Issues:

- On SE's part: Slips are broken again. The patch by Thorny works again.

- Windower Dev: Gearswap and Shortcuts might be non-functional, the `all` functionality in superwarp is broken. Other addons might also not be working. This is temporary and is due to a change in core libraries. This is limited to the Dev version, so switch to Live for the time being. Or revert your strings.lua to a previous versions if you know how to do it. This should be resolved in a day or two.

Addon updates!

The send addon has been refactored and updated:
- the addon now properly supports strings containing double quotes. //send @all /item "Abdhaljs Seal" <me> works directly, without the need for backslashes or other workarounds. Rejoice!
- a debug functionality has been added. //send @debug on to turn it on (and off to turn it off). When turned on, the text being sent/received is print to the chatlog, which can be useful in some cases. Default is off.
- two new targets have been added:
@party targets all local characters in the same party (irrespective of where they are),
@zone targets all characters in the same zone as the sender.
- PLANNED but not implemented yet: send might eventually support more targets (@alliance, @notparty, @notzone, etc), just not yet.

For developers: the strings library has been expanded with new encoding-aware functions, supporting strings encoded in ascii, utf8, or shift-jis. These replace stock string functions (it, find, match, gmatch, gsub, split) and are especially important when dealing with user-inputed text, to better support japanese users (but not only). Refer to https://github.com/Windower/Lua/edit/dev/addons/libs/strings.lua for details over the implementations.

Plugin Updates!

FFXIDB (v1.2.2.1)

Addition of color options for the dots drawn on the map:

• ColorPC

• ColorNPC

• ColorMob

this is mainly for accessibility for people who have a hard time distinguishing between the mob(red) and npc(green) default colors.

the Original colors are set as the default, so users not interested in changing the colors dont have to do anything.

Timers (v3.7.7.0)

Change how abilities with charges are handled.

This means COR's Quick Draw now has the correct recast time even when using gear like blood mask.

This change also seemed like a good opportunity to separate the Ready and Sic timers for BST. Now Ready will show as the timer title when Ready is used, and Sic will no longer report as Sic[3] and will show as a timer titled Sic with the recasts duration in 1 bar rather than 3.

SCH should notice no change.

As someone coming from 7 years into a career with digital accessibility, this effort is appreciated! /highfive