FFXI Finally In High Quality Graphics

I think the best thing about this is that it seems to block the "Full screen was lost" crash that happens if your screen changes res for any reason (ie: loading another game and you dont want to log out your char because its a tedious process to log back in)

Got some erratic behavior when I had MSAA x2 with SuperSampling 2x simultaneously. I disabled the MSAA entirely since I'm SuperSampling at a high resolution.

I installed Shader, and clicked the POL.exe. The files went into the POL folder.

However, when I boot up, there is no tutorial and Shift+F2 does nothing. Any ideas?

I figured it out! I didn't think to unblock the actual Voodoo program as well.

Does anyone have any suggestions for the setup of the shaders?

McKeller another poster had a post couple pages back with what he used and screenshots. One day when I have time I wana mess around and figure out which are best. The ones he posted looked nice but dropped my fps down to a crawl 2boxing.

Hate being the guy that just posts problems :s

had this happen twice so far; second instance of FFXI loads up fine all the way past character select screen. Once character is selected and logged in, it will go into black screen with "downloading data" in the lower right corner forever.
Only happens on 2nd instance (dual box). Funny enough I could target my mule in Mhaura in game from my main character, but on mule's ffxi window she was still loading and had black screen. Happened more than 5 times. Its not consistent as I will just head to task manager and choose to end the process tree from there and re-try. Sometimes works right away, sometimes takes as much as 3-4 tries before its resolved.

For some reason windows 8.1 won't let me copy/replace d3dcompiler_47.dll into my windows/sysWow64 folder.
It keeps on saying I don't have permission despite me being the only user on my laptop and theoretically having administrator access(I notice windows8.1 likes to ignore that I am one often with this case being the latest example)
Is there any sort of workaround?

If it already exists, no need to replace it. File was provided in case you didn't already have d3dcompiler_47.dll from another update or program

Oh boy is this thing awesome. The performance boost on my laptop is super amazing. I can triple box with no slow down when before I was being pushed down to 15fps.

Anyway to get mouse working in ashita with this?

http://ashita.atom0s.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=188

I used this:
http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?/topic/13145-rel-take-control-b2/

It is an app that does the job for you to take full control of any file you choose.

Perfect, thanks!

Have it all up and running but the font is sort of pixelated, any suggestions?

Change font from High Quality to Compressed or Uncompressed in FFXI Config.

So I'm doing this now since there is a maintenance for about 2 hours. I put the files where they're supposed to be. Are there any settings I need to change when I open up dgV?

I tried to install it and everything went fine so far. Put the DLLs in the right folders, configured the settings. On first try it crashed when I tried to use maximum settings available, then I used the standard settings and it worked. I still notice the font being slightly messy, but the thing is, I still can't exit the game without crashing it which was the sole reason I tried to use dgVoodoo. Does anyone have any hint on what could be the cause for this? Does one need a special point in the settings enabled?

Edit: The cause seems to be a different one. I found out that selecting the PlayOnline and the FFXI folder in dgVoodoo causes the game to crash. So I just entered the PlayOnline folder and did not change any of the settings. Still there seems to be nothing changed about the windowing problem. I may have overlooked something, but if I conclude right, the following steps should be anything needed for it to work:
- Place the corresponding DLCs into the right Windows folder
- Place the D3 Dll into the PlayOnline folder
- Start up dgVoodoo, add the PlayOnline folder as a path and save the settings so you get the config file
I've done all of this and still I can't recognize any change. Do we need the FFXI folder after all?

Gotta be on a OS higher then Windows XP, and since you didn't give context we're just going to assuming your running this on XP.

Aside from Saevel's comment above, if you haven't changed any settings at all in dgVoodoo, there may not be any visual changes. Unless you are forcing AA or AF or have played with the color/brightness/contrast settings, its my understanding that the only noticeable changes would be in GPU usage going up, and CPU dropping a bit, due to the DX calls being routed (properly) to the GPU instead of MS's software emulation for DX8 being run on the CPU.

Of course not. I'm sorry I didn't provide enough information. I'm running on Windows 10.

I don't mean those kinda changes. I mean Alt + Tab still crashes my game.

Now for some more information: I've unblocked all the DLLs, I've changed no settings except for the memory (64mb -> 1024mb) and I'm running as administrator. When I click play, the screen turns black, then goes back to normal again and PlayOnline says it could'nt keep up the full screen mode. When I looked up in the task manager, I found out that the DLL that pol.exe is using is from System32, not from my FFXI directory. So there seems to be an issue causing it not to load that DLL. Are there any other hindrances aside from the DLLs being blocked?

Ok that's better. Are you running Windower with this? For my running POL by itself would sometime give random results and I'd have to reboot the machine, has to do with the d3d8.dll already being in memory from something else loaded and the game using the one already loaded in memory instead of the proxy in it's folder. Windows .dll access rules are kinda annoying. If I run windower then it always loads the .dll from the POL folder regardless if there is already the system32 version loaded in system memory.

What graphics card do you have and have you loaded the appropriate manufacture driver package? You might want to start with 512MB of graphics memory and use default settings just to see if it loads with the watermark or not.

No, I have never used it.

That seems like an idea. I will try this.

I got a GTX 960 and I'm using the official driver. It has 4GB of memory, so this shouldn't be a problem. But I'll try 512MB.

And found the problem, it's super interesting and might even be a bug or possibly just a result of how Windower's hooking works.. Windower has a different working folder then native FFXI for startup.

Windower use's the PlayOnlineViewer folder for it's startup location, Native Playone use's the FinalFantasyXI folder for it's startup location.

In practice this means the location of your d3d8.dll file and config will change based on if you use Windower or not. Since like 99% of the modding community use's it we all tend to assume it's normal so I never thought to do checking for these kinds of things.

So yeah if you are using FFXI vanilla please put your filed in the FinalFantasyXI folder next to ffximain.dll.

*Technical Note for geeks*
When windower loads it calls d3d8.dll from the PlayOnlineViewer folder which is when it gets loaded. Native FFXI doesn't call that library until FFXIMain.dll loads and by then the working folder has switched to the FinalFantasyXI one. Listdll.exe was my best friend for this.

On a side note, has anyone figured out how to force hardware mouse with Windower and not Ashita?

Edit: Wrong post quoted.

@Saevel
Thanks, this did it for me ^^. The logo showed up, I could even use maximum settings. I would never have expected the Anti-Aliasing to work that great, it looks a lot better than the backround resolution Anti-Aliasing.

Though, still I can't do Alt + Tab. Seems to be a problem with my computer then ...

Swear I have sifted through multiple pages in this thread without seeing an answer:

Does this DgVoodoo help at all with desktop PCs? If so, does this fix the Nvidia d3dx tdr crashes that occurs with newer Nvidia cards/drivers?

It does help on desktop PCs. It increases graphics quality and offloads some processing from the CPU to the GPU.

The jury is still out on the nvidia TDRs, but I have yet to hear of anyone TDRing with dgvoodoo so there's a strong possibility it does fix them.

Several of us have said that it helps with the quality of animations, lighting and special effects.

And yes it does seem to fix the nVidia driver crashing.

figured out my problem with dual/trio boxing. Had settings on way too high and SSX8. long story short, almost burnt my graphic cards. Have done this before, but not with DGvoodoo. For first time in a long time, I actually had no RAM left for 3rd box. Be careful.