FFXI Coding Lore

Since the random question thread packet question was taking on a life of its own

I figure this would be a better place for engagement of this type
And those who are interested in just reading

Who do we have to thank for the analysis on the packet system?
And what methods were used to discover and map them?

We have this process to thank for a lot of the add-ons we use today.

I hear that a FFXI player ventured deep into the woods and discovered a magical stream. When they drank from it their mind was instantly filled with all the spaghetti in the universe. They have since spent their life sharing this spaghetti with us in the form of packets

For windrower we have these lines at the bottom of our main landing page:
Note that Wiccan == atom0s

For ffxiah there is the about page: https://www.ffxiah.com/about

Cant speak to who specifically was the one who did the initial RE on packets but atom0s has the most extensive documentation on FFXI RE: https://github.com/atom0s/XiPackets

There was a project very early on when I started, ~2003, to gather packet data with context from people willing to help capture packets. I don't recall specifically how it was done or who did it, it also could've just been a front for something else, but I distinctly remember the website asking people to submit specific packet captures with the purpose of understanding the protocol and building a private server. It was what first sparked my interest in reverse engineering.

It could also be someone that thought they could get more info out of the data than they could and it never went anywhere, but I remember the website and instructions they posted on capturing/submitting the data. I have no idea if that fed into efforts to reverse engineer or document the protocol that we have today, though.

There's also a huge gap between gathering that and actually being able to parse/interpret the captures and I have no idea when that happened. Reverse engineering tools in 2003 were not as mature as they are now, although they did work, they were tedious and buggy nightmares.

atom0s had a good breakdown of the windower / ashita history here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/rz9hca/windower_or_ashita_in_2022/

Looking at our commit history, I wrote and released most of my addons in 2013/2014 as we tried to drive v4 adoption by replacing v3 plugin functionality with v4 addons.

I made some design decisions (like forcing people to learn Lua) and improvements, but it's worth noting that I basically had product specs for several of my addons in the form of v3 plugins. That was pretty useful for someone that had no significant dev experience.

cancel = replaced cancel
gearswap = part of spellcast
pointwatch = replaced something, but I forget what it was called
send = I forget the name of the program this replaced, but it's just a thin wrapper around the windower API
shortcuts = part of spellcast
answeringmachine, battlemod, boxdestroyer, organizer, translate = novel functionality?