Windower Won't Start! - Windower V4.3 And The Creators Update

(Paraphrased for brevity)

This is the same community where some members have repeatedly asked "Why can't SE just copy the party finder from XIV?"

(For those people: it'd be about as easy as frying an egg in your Blue Ray Player)

Its not just windows key it seems, i use the Alt a lot and it appears nvidia shortcuts took those away for its screenshot and recording functions, yay for a 45 minute video of me standing in my mog house. Anyway disabling the nvidia experience share function made all those binds work without reloading or rebinding anything, changing all the nvidia key shortcuts to other combinations also worked. Turning the share function back on or changing the key combinations back to the same ones as my windower binds makes them overrule my windower binds again.

Yes. Not sure what's so mind blowing about this. It's the most common operating system our player base uses (by far), and it's growing constantly. It was facing a critical issue that would mean half of our users would not be able to play anymore. See more details below.


We have statistics:


No.

We released a broken build, sure. But *** up implies a glaring mistake in our process, incompetence, carelessness, etc. And while we had a number of bugs, we did everything right in the process. We tested internally until it passed our own checks. Then we released it to the public through our dev stream until they also reported all the major issues fixed. After two weeks of public testing the following issues were the only ones left that we knew about with version 4.3:

• It crashes on minimizing for some people

• Windows key does not work in keybinds

• In windowed mode the close button is greyed out

Contrast that to this one issue 4.2 had:

• People can't log in and play

So we made a conscious choice to release it despite the known issues. And I maintain it was the right choice given all the information at the time. This update we pushed fixed the game for many people who had or were about to have updated to the Windows 10 Creators' Update. As Iryoku showed above, that concerns about half of all Windower users. In addition to that we had reports that this also fixed a number of outstanding issues Windows 8 users were having who couldn't log in at all. And here's the thing: even despite all the issues people have reported since, statistically it still looks like this was a net benefit for many Windower users.

So what you're really saying is that we messed up your weekend. And you're furious, we get it. If you wanna say that's *** up, that's your prerogative. But I will not agree to that assertion, and rationally you can't expect me to, given the above.


Whatever made you think we won't fix it? You don't have to beg us. You don't even have to ask us. If you just provide us with the info we need (which, btw, people have yet to do - aside from one crash concerning a 32 bit OS and one about private servers, we have no crash dumps or even detailed crash reports for anything) we will get on it on our own.

All this aside, I wanna say something about disabling updates. It was a very conscious and very careful decision the team made to force updates. And while that decision was made before my arrival on the team, I do agree with it. So disabling updates is not a missing feature, or something we're too lazy to do. It's something we chose not to do, and here are the two main arguments that influenced that decision:


There are other advantages, but these two I would consider key arguments, and most of the other arguments can be reduced to time savings anyway.

You can disagree with these decisions. Some people think it's not our ethical responsibility to care for peoples' security either. There's nothing to say to that, other than that we feel differently. I also may not speak for the entire team - which is a fluctuating team anyway, and everyone has their own opinions on things. But that's generally how most of us feel. I don't know what Windower 5's future will hold and how our update system will work there, but for the time being I wouldn't count on it to be any different.

Now, I can see the argument for reverting to an old version (and frankly, I can't stop people from blocking updates - it's not magic, anyone can do it if they want), but people asking for that are again missing that this update is a net benefit. It may cause issues for some, but it fixes them for others.

The only thing we could do is have two separate versions - which indeed was the point behind the dev and live system. Unfortunately that system seems to need a bit of practice. So once again I'd like to appeal to people to help us out, so we can avoid situations like these in the future.

And one final point, which is especially important for people posting here: not all devs read these forums. Sometimes people remind us on IRC about things that go on here, but for the most part we work off of our issue tracker. Forums are notoriously ill-suited for this. I can see the comfort you have in posting here over registering with a service like GitHub, but you cannot expect us to keep up to date with all posts in all major related forums. If you find a bug, please report it on the issue tracker. If it's a crash, please try to post a crash dump along with it.

We have currently only 6 reported issues with Windower 4.3 there. Of those, one is regarding private servers, another regarding Windows XP, two about keyboard issues, one where the Windower launcher is hanging. And only one about crashes, and it gives neither any information, nor any crash dumps.

Tl;dr, the update is done, we won't revert it. We will work on known issues. Please help us where you can.

I am on Windows 7 64 bit. Upon downloading the update this morning, I can log into POL and onto a character, but after a random short period of time, POL crashes every time.

IN an attempt to help (not complaining), I did download and install the dumpsetup.exe and was able to get a .dmp report to produce. I am now making a sign-on for GitHub so I can post this issue there and hopefully can figure out how to post a link to the dump report.

I just logged in to Original Windower 4.3 and it did a Hook update. Looks like a rollback. But it's working perfectly now.

Same issue but windows vista 32-bit

Same thing with Win10 Pro 32-bit.

Currently running with latest hook and dev build from Thursday/Friday last week without issue.

It's 2017, why the hell are people still running x86 versions of Windows?

Entitlement upgrade, Win 7 x86 ->Win 10 x86 in my case.

I noticed a common issue that caused crashing for a number of people: old, unsupported plugins.

A while ago, we deprecated and subsequently removed many plugins. In doing so, we also stopped the Windower launcher from loading them. However, some people did not load them through the launcher but through custom mechanisms, such as the init.txt (which was the way to do it for Windower 3). These still persist and try to load old plugins which are no longer compatible with the newer Windower, causing crashes.

So if you load plugins through a non-launcher way (init.txt or the plugin_manager addon, or whichever other way people come up with), remove the old plugins mentioned in the above list. As far as the init.txt goes, you should remove them all from there and add them to the Windower launcher (run Windower and click on the *Plugins* tab). The init.txt method to load plugins should never have been used with Windower 4, I assume people just copied their init.txt over from Windower 3.

You have Pro, you can install any of it anyway.

Because you're going to drive a lot of the userbase away by not supporting the more stable OS. /shrug

I certainly didn't expect that big of a response, so thanks for that. The insight is valuable.

I haven't seen this posted anywhere else and doesn't seem like it needs another thread when can be shared here.

Two people I know are losing macro lines in game. One guy thinks using macro set commands and macro book commands is maybe causing the issue. The lines seem to just poof. I'm unsure if it's just when executed via windower or if he's tried it inline in game.

This even happens when not dualboxing (I know Windower uses some voodoo to try to make the game play smoothly with multiple instances. So my first thought maybe some threads were getting crossed as a possibility.)

Yeah I'm the guy that made the Macro Editor but neither of these friends have used it because their macros were complete and I of course never saw any such problem, but it was the very first thing I asked about.

I don't even play anymore but Windower's many team members (past and present) deserve a lot of respect for making the game far better than SE was willing to.

Please remember to ask your friends to submit a official report on the windower bug reporting website https://github.com/Windower/Issues/issues As reddit and ffxiah.com aren't the place to submit it

Ask them to submit as much information including system infomation "Start button -> all programs, accessories, system tools, system information". click the edit button to select all then click the edit button again then select copy. any bug reports that the game might generate.

also include what plugins, add-ons and which version/hook of windower is currently on the computer and which ones are currently active. what situation they were in (E.g. in the mog house or fighting a mob or clicking a npc etc), did the game lag, what state did it revert to (E.g. back to how you first get macros when you install ff11 or is it completely blank) etc etc.

Add as much information so the dev team can attempt to recreate such a situation so they might beable to narrow when and how it occurs

I thought my crashing caused my macros to disappear until I just redid a bunch of them, changed jobs a few times, and more are gone now.

Disabled MacroChanger since it looked like it was acting up, and nothing has disappeared yet. Might be the cause of that one.

make a thread and report it on
https://github.com/Windower/Issues/issues

-include as much info as you can including general system you use (Since all windowers systems seems to be functioning differently atm, and include if you have the windowers 10 creators edition and if your using a XiLoader)
-Conditions that lead to the problem,
-Your windower version/hook and if its the dev version
-plugin or addon (Since some people have been using older versions)
-and any dump reports that may have arisen as a resulted

Is there plans to try to get out of using this in the future if possible, or are you considering it a path already taken?

*Note: Not affecting me one way or the other it looks like, just curious.

I'm not sure if this is related to these changes/updates, but this is my first time getting back on XI on my laptop. Whenever I change the active window from XI to something else, it freezes and crashes. I've been able to putz around for 15m+ at a time as long as I don't change the window -- it doesn't seem there is some inevitable crash coming to matter what. I've unloaded all plugins and add-ons and the crashes still happen on window change.

I followed someone's steps earlier to get a crash dump and I threw it up on my gdrive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7QlleGZS4OLTkg0SjNYQTJTTzA/view?usp=sharing


Any suggestions or fixes?

He said in another post (maybe the one you quoted, not sure, I'm tired) that Windower 5 is in the works and has its own hook. Using SE windowed mode was a duct tape job.

Maybe we should give them less ***and hope that gives them more time for Windower 5.

I wasn't giving anyone ***?

I'm aware of what was said about the hook, it doesn't change my inquiry.

I found a better fix for the windows key hotkeys that doesn't break anything you don't want it to. I was able to use this to permanently disable my windows + number shortcuts while leaving the more useful ones intact. A single logout/reboot is required still.

http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/shell/explorer/globalhotkeys.htm

An update of sorts:

We just pushed a new launcher to the dev branch. This rolled back some of the changes and attempted to keep the injection method as similar to 4.2 as possible while still retaining required changes. If you were having issues with the launcher, give this a try:

http://update.windower.net/dev/Windower.exe

The following issues are currently being looked at and in the internal testing process:

* Buttons being stuck down while out of focus (alt-tab issue). This is essentially fixed as far as I can tell.
* Replicating the 4.2 behavior of controller input. This is nearly functional, and needs some minor adjustments due to code oddities that are likely on SE's end.

Please continue to provide constructive feedback, including detailed descriptions of problems and crash dumps where applicable, and we will continue looking into problems. Thanks!

Thank you for you efforts. Seems most of the issues I had before are gone. The only remaining issue i have still is random crashes when running multiple charaters,I can come back from AFK and someone will crash not entirely sure how to post a dump or a crash log for it. i have the .dmp file but i dont know how to covert it to txt and post it to here

You don't convert .dmp files to text, you upload them and we run them.

We have a linkshell member who also said his macro lines were disappearing one by one. This started a few days ago.

Where can i upload them? i tried on github and it keeps telling me file not supported