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.

We will soon push a new hook to the dev branch. This one doesn't change anything, but is a preparation to make shortcuts able to handle the `//bind` command again. The goal of testing this is just to see if it still behaves the same way as it does now. I will push it to the dev branch in around 4 or 5 hours, just to give you guys a heads up.

A new hook is now on dev, version `4.6.3.0`, which enables the old `//bind` behavior, meaning calling `//bind` with less than two arguments will go on to the addon command handler, meaning an addon like Shortcuts can process it.

I done *** up again. If your `Windower.exe` is version 4.6.3.3 you will need to either download a file from the website and overwrite the file in your Windower folder, or rename the file to something else, run it, then rename it back to `Windower.exe`.

This version never made it to the stable branch, so unless you're playing on the dev branch, you're good.

We will be pushing updates onto the development branch later tonight. If you play on it, I would recommend switching to back stable (see OP for instructions), if you're doing anything important. If not, we'd appreciate if you could keep helping us test these changes, by just playing normally. Nothing in particular should change with this update, these changes will just enable better Japanese language support further down the line, as well as simplify some of the existing plugins.

We pushed some more updates to the development branch. A bunch of fixes for current issues on the stable branch, as well as fixes for previous issues of the dev branch, which we had to revert. The packet loss people have been experiencing should be gone now, and initial testing by some of our members and helpers has been very positive, but we'd appreciate some more community testing for a day or two. If we don't get any complaints by Saturday morning, I plan to push these changes to the stable branch.

If you want to help test the changes, do the following:
1. Shut down all POL and Windower instances.
2. Open the `Windower/settings.xml` file and change the line that reads `<branch>stable</branch>` to `<branch>dev</branch>`.
3. Start Windower normally and log into all your characters.
4. Play normally and see if everything works as expected.

If you encounter any issues, feel free to report it in here or on our Discord server.

If you want to switch back to the stable branch, either simply repeat the steps above, except reverse step 2, or alternatively, open Windower, click the new `Branch` tab at the top, and click the button there to switch back to the stable branch.

Appreciate any help in testing this. We do try to test things internally, but we only use a fraction of all available addons, and do only a fraction of the available content in-game, so we obviously miss things sometimes.

Can you please explain if/how being on dev branch impacts plugins/addons sourced from launcher and how reverting back to stable won't cause any issues?

When you switch to the development branch, all the addons and plugins installed from the launcher will update to the respective development version as well. Addons and plugins that are not from the launcher, however, will not, and those may fail, if they rely on something we changed between versions. Knowing which plugins and addons fail with the development version is also useful for us, and would be part of the testing we ask for here.

Switching back to the stable version will, likewise, switch all addons and plugins back to their stable versions as well.

Do note, however, that any changes you made to Lua code of addons from the launcher will also be overwritten, if those files have changed between the stable and development version. This only affects actual addon code though, not user files, like addon settings or GearSwap user files. Those will not be touched. And only if that particular file has changed between the stable and development branch.

Just wondering, are there any further news on this? Thanks!

Everybody ready for their custom addons and lua's to break?

I'm super ready for faster POL and login flow!

I've been on dev for a week and have only one weird bug report Against Timers that doesn't affect the way I play.

have quite a few custom luas, none of which broke with this update.

there was a bunch of global variables removed that broke typos i had in said custom luas

wasn't dressup the main thing that was breaking?

Sorry for the delay, a quick status update. We have fixed the packet loss issue that was caused by DressUp, but was really an underlying issue in our core packet handler. This may have been the cause of packet loss and crashes in some situations, and should be more stable now.

However, there are two other known issues with the current dev version:
1. Timers stutters when updating its bars, and isn't smooth like on the stable branch.
2. Some graphics crashes that don't seem to happen on the stable branch.

Both issues only happen for some people, and not everyone. Some people have been playing fine on dev for months, while others still experience these two issues. We're still working on fixing them, and once we do, the dev branch will be ready to be pushed out to the public, but can't say when this will be. The second issue in particular is annoying to debug.

As always, would appreciate some feedback, including when you're *not* experiencing any issues.

Thanks for the update! Looking forward to try the new features once the bugs are crushed! :)

Where's the documentation on/code of timers? I assumed that plugins also lived in the "Lua" repo, but they clearly don't because they aren't lua. Wanted to take a crack at looking at it, many hands make light work etc, I'm very stupid but I'm just trying to help here.

All plugins are closed-source. Windower team maintain them.

That said, Timers could and should really be ported to an addon, so everyone can contribute to it. It's one of the few remaining plugins that actually can be converted to an addon. It's just that no one wanted to put the effort in so far...

If anyone here wants to take a crack at it, feel free to do it.

omg yeah man.. i'm not a code-savvy at all but while being absolutely ignorant about it (i just write my own GS but that's it basically), I recently tried to improve Timers plugin as we all know it has some major flaws (//unload leaving printed on-screen within the client its UI with no way to reset it, for example), but indeed I came to the conclusion that it's not possible to customize it with a Lua "patch", but would need to be reverse-engineered from the .dll in order to actually change something (unless you got access to the original code ofc). Blacklist filters also weren't working afaik..

I even tried to have AIs inspect the dll and took a look at similar Ashita/Windower addons in order to make a "ported Lua version" of it, but failed miserably.

I don't strictly care about it being a plugin or Lua addon, but i'd love for it to have working filters and a real //unload or reset function one day, eventually lmao!

After writing a similar addon for Ashita, I can pretty confidently say that timers is one of the nastiest problems to solve in the space. It's a mountain of edge cases, unknowns, and imperfection. I'm not really happy with what I churned out, and I definitely do not blame anyone for not wanting to tackle porting it.

This is fixed on dev

What is not working about the filters? (this is usually "user error" when it comes to like filtering SPs because they work in a very unexpected way)

Hi team, thanks for all the work! I'm here to report on trying out the dev branch (v 4.7.9.1) today:

- The POL speed and no-throttle advanced settings are awesome!

- The game crashes entirely when getting to character select. Sometimes it's immediately after clicking "Select Character", others it's right after the characters appear on the screen. I tried around ~8 times with both the Large Address toggle on and off. That didn't make a difference but I suspect it to be related as the timing coincides with the game's first attempt at rendering character models.

This doesn't seem to be producing a new crash.log so I'm not sure where to dig for further details but figured I'd surface this at least.

Again, appreciate all the work! Would be happy to help debug this further of course :)

Oh absolutely, and I don't blame anyone either (I mean, I could have done it too, but don't want to :D). But precisely because of all of these edge cases, it would be nice if this was open sourced, so people could contribute to it easier.


It sounds like this could be addon related. Can you try loading without plugins and addons, and see if you still crash? If not, can you then try to load plugins and addons manually, and see if any one of them crashes you on load?


The `crash.log` file is only for launcher related crashes (the green popup when you start Windower). After POL loads, no such file will be generated when you crash. However, if you follow the instructions here, and then crash again, you might get a crash dump in the `Windower/dumps/` folder. This file might be helpful in debugging it, if the previous addon loading thing doesn't help.