Dev Tracker - Discussion

They would rather octuple down on making excuses than fix the issue the right way

How many times can they say because of small servers, or because of large servers, apparently infinite.

Come to jesus. *** the small servers. If they lose besieged, oh the *** well. That's where they want to be, it has consequences. Good parts and bad parts.

(I don't give a ***if they do or don't make besieged higher level, I'm just tired of the same excuse)

At the exact same time, they care if a server fails beieged, but don't give a rats *** that servers are abandoning limbus.

I understood to a point not doing this previously, but with bigger servers closed there is no excuse now. They could even add higher drop rates to smaller servers for certain items.

It literally just boils down to them not wanting to pay someone to do it, even though the game makes tons of money.

Not too sure about that one, relative to upkeep costs it likely does(because there's barely any costs going into it) but compared to what other projects they could be working on, because there isnt some history of failures there or anything, XI isnt a big money maker. Just that nice reliable side hustle they can talk about every once in awhile

None of those private servers are accurate, not a single one. They are all emulators, attempting to emulate what they believe is happening on SE's server. But here is the rub, the people at SE who wrote FFXI were all console developers used to writing in pseudo ASM languages. LSB and other emulates are all C++ / lua / python with a SQL database, which I guarantee FFXI servers don't use. There are many performance related tricks you can do in ASM that C++ compilers won't implement, it's the whole reason we keep seeing /1024 show up, FFXI server doesn't use any decimal places for calculations.

I think "emulator" is stretching it or giving too much credit. They're guesstimates.

I tried a private server once - it was very uncanny valley. It was a pantomime. It felt wrong. Even the mobs pathed strangely.

So while I want SE to fix QoL things and make improvements and continue to actively support and develop the game... I'm very wary of their choices in how they're going to go about it without ruining the game we're all used to (warts and all).

The last thing I want is "hey, we fixed networking, also you can't change equipment anymore if you've got a mob claimed."

It emulates the FFXI server in responding to the retail FFXI client. In the retro community that is what it's called when you use client data to create a piece of software that tricks the client into thinking it's talking to a real server. We call it a "server emulator", lots of games have them now.


I honestly don't think they have anyone left who could modify that level of server code. As I mentioned above the OG coders were all console devs used to writing highly optimized ASM. That is an insanely specialized skillset that virtually no high level language people today can do.

Just as an example, this is what a simple "Hello World" program looks like in ASM.

https://onecompiler.com/assembly/3uccjrhsa



ASM was the first language I learned back in the 90's, it's archaic and it's syntax and behavior is one step above binary machine code with almost no abstraction. Someone working on the networking code wouldn't be using some high level abstracted network library, but instead directly managing buffers and queues. Messing with one function could very well break the behavior of a dozen others by changing the assumptions they were written under.

Private servers be like

I heard you like campaigns, so we decided to make it as awkward as possible.

Campaign Period:
Wednesday, May 13, 2026, at 1:00 a.m. (PDT) to Tuesday, June 9, at 7:59 a.m.



Extended Schedule
■ Phase 1: Sunday, 17 May, 2026, at 8:00 a.m. (GMT) / 9:00 a.m. (BST)
■ Phase 2: Sunday, 24 May, 2026, at 8:00 a.m. (GMT) / 9:00 a.m. (BST)
■ Phase 3: Sunday, 31 May, 2026, at 8:00 a.m. (GMT) / 9:00 a.m. (BST)
■ Phase 4: Friday, 5 June, 2026, at 8:00 a.m. (GMT) / 9:00 a.m. (BST)
EU: http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics/ff11eu/detail/40214/detail.html
US: http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics/ff11us/detail/40213/detail.html

I must be dumb, I don't get it.
How is it supposed to work?
The first block is a "basic" campaign active from the beginning to the end.
The "phase" ones are additional bonus that start on the day written there and end when a new phase start.

Is it like that? Or what?

no, it's additive

phase 1 kicks in, then phase 2 (phase 1 stays active), then phase 3 (1 and 2 stay active)...

(which kind of sucks for anyone who wanted to skill up crafts or get Kupon I-Seals, enjoy waiting a month for no reason!)

28 days of campaign
24 days of campaign plus bonus 1
17 days of campaign plus bonus 1 and 2
10 days of campaign plus bonus 1 2 and 3
5 days of campaign plus bonus 1 2 3 and 4

....AND the exemplar bonus campaign is the week before that

Se: we want players to not have too many campaigns to choose from.

Also se: here's an overly concoluted and over complicated graph of when the four different campaign phases we run for each campaign start.

Now you don't even know what campaigns are on and when so you don't feel compelled to do them all. You're welcome.

enjoy the day or so of the oddessy campaign... what a joke.

You can't do overly complicated campaigns like this when there is no indication of what is currently happening in the game.

It was fine as it was, most people are just going to opt out of this completely cause they won't even know wtf is happening and when.

so of the people complaining the campaigns are hard to understand, how many of you are illiterate and how many of you are arguing on behalf of the theoretical illiterate people

...It's funny... The majority of the playerbase is straight up *** illiterate and they come up with ***like this

Typical not understanding your audience

Its not hard to understand

Its just stupid (opinion my own)

Oh here we go, if you think thing is overly complicated you're just stupid.

It's perfectly understandable. And overly complicated to the point it is a net negative compared to all campaigns start and end same time.

Hope that's clear.

I am quite surprised how many people cant seem to pronounce words correctly when in voice chat with them to be honest

do we have any idea where this complaint even came from? who the hell is mad about more stuff being available in the same time frame, and why do they keep listening to them?!

It was last year, and they're not wrong.

There's just no solution for it.

When there's so many campaigns up you want, analysis paralysis kicks your ***.

Why not just make some of them available full-time, then? Like the baseline Omen Cards and Statue Crusher (not the "PLUS!" versions that are actually good), no reason not to do that in 2026.

It's really simple. . . when the campaigns all start at the same time and are consistent throughout, you read the campaigns once and roughly know what's active. When they do these staggered campaigns you read them and know the campaign you want is in the mix, but have to reference the post on the day you might actually want to do the content.

All campaigns active > HTBF is in there > Sunday I have free time to do HTBFs and know campaign is active. (Good)

Staggered campaigns > HTBF is in there > Sunday I have free time to do HTBFs > reference post and learn it's in the second half of the month or worse I missed the HTBF window. And maybe if I'm lucky, it is actually active. (Annoying)

This being additive rather than swapping them around is a little less annoying, but still. . . annoying.

Most likely entitlement creep.

You did this why not that.

Ok you did that now this.

How about this too.

Now all the campaigns are meaningless. Everything is always on and you burn out.
(every campaign has some push or pull on the larger economy too, that's always a consideration)

The actual actual solution is to have everything that is part of a campaign active 100% of the time instead of only during certain dates/times.

If everything is available all the time you don't have to choose. You can just do what you want when you want to.

But doing that means no fomo from limited time campaigns so it won't happen.

Iirc too much stuff to choose from in campaigns was feedback from the survey they did. I guess no one clued in that if you complain about too much of a good thing the end result will always be a negative.

Most JP players on twitter are complaining about it being too messy, too many things being offered at once.


Cause they don't want players to cap things, this is most obvious in relation to crafting. When people run out of things to +1, they will stop logging in. They have to offer it, cause it works to get people engage but they don't actually want you to cap them when they are not adding new engaging things.

When you fail to copy pastev.

FFXI is compiled with MSVC bundled with Visual Studio 6 and the code, as far as I can tell, is C++.

I don't know what universe you're living in, but FFXI was not written in pure assembly. Usually people write C/C++ and then stitch in assembly in pieces of functions IF they need to. That is a big IF.

Your post seems to imply that you can't do bit shifting in C/C++ too from the reference to "/1024". If you're implying that, then that is also incorrect.

Edit because phone typing is hard

That is all FFXI PC Client, which is not the original client, much less the server. FFXI original coding was done back in 2000~2002 by a team that specialized in SNES and PSX console games.

Bit shifting isn't something frequently done in C, or any other language as it's an arcane technique that's not needed much anymore. Where it is useful is when your compute is a 1.8 to 3.5Mhz CPU or if your really rocking then 33Mhz. Then every cycle, every byte of memory count and every IO operation count.

The math of bit shifting is to ensure every multiplication is done on whole integers, which are computationally much easier to handle inside Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs).

For example lets do a simple C = A * B, where A is 4837 and B is 3.85.

Since ALU's have to operate on whole integers we have to break B into two separate values, B1 which is 3, B2 which is shifted to 85. Then multiply A by B1 and B2 separately, then shift A2 while storing the decimal place into A3. Finally all three are added together into a packed fixed decimal value. This is what the C compiler is doing for you because it's assuming you care about the decimal results as you started off with a decimal value to begin with.

Now instead lets just add two decimal places to B by shifting it to 385. We then multiply it once by A, shift again to drop the decimal places to get 18622. Much faster because we don't care about the decimal place.

Now for why it's 1024 and not 1000, because this is all being done on processors that only speak binary and in binary each number place is a value of 2 not 10.

That means a weapon skill with a fTP value of "3.85" would not be stored as a fixed decimal value 3.85, but instead as a shifted binary value of 3942, or 0000111101100110.

If a weapons base damage after WSC / fSTR was 894 (0000001101111110), and the fTP was "3.85", it would really be 001101111110 * 111101100110 = 01101011100011000110100. We then remove the ten decimal places that 1024 represents to get 0110101110001, which is 3441.

894 * 3.85 = 3441.9

That right there is what FFXI's server is doing and why every percentage seems to be /1024. They are shifting ever percentage value by ten binary digits to get rid of the decimal place and turn it into a pure integer multiplication, then shifting it back which drops those digits resulting it looking like it's "flooring", which it isn't. Because the values were never stored in any form of fixed decimal value there was never a remainder to drop.

Agner does a good job of breaking down instruction cycle time and latency, though it's only on x86 CPUs and there is no guaranteed that SE is running this game on an x86 CPU as there were many popular 64-bit RISC designs during that time.

https://www.agner.org/optimize/#manual_instr_tab

Bit shifting can be done in a single clock cycle, multiplication takes 2~4 depending if you are referencing a register or memory location. Reading or writing memory, MOV, costs 1 cycle. By using bit shifting we can shave a bunch of cycles off our computation time, at the cost of losing accuracy and having to ensure everything is an integer.

Nobody does this anymore because it's simply not needed in the age of super scalar out of order execution CPUs with large L1 instruction and data caches. It wouldn't really give much of a benefit nowadays, but back in the 90's and early 2000's these optimizations were critical to squeezing every drop of performance out of consoles.