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.