Final Fantasy XI Forum

Been spending a good week now trying to tweak this game for CrossOver Games 8.0 and to no avail. Never have I experienced more problems with CrossOver than with this version. The game can run POL, SOMETIMES, yes I did say sometimes. It makes no sense. Sometimes it starts up after I get the 'POL.exe has encountered a serious problem' and so on blha blah... and sometimes it just hangs after that not launching POL at all, it mostly hangs and doesn't get into POL.
But one of the few times I actually into FFXI (the game itself loads just fine) I of course wanted to test out the gamepad compatibility. The FFXI config didn't work of course so I imported a Windows created registry key with the settings I wanted. These settings were 100% identical to the default ones for the gamepad config in FFXI.
Tested it in POL viewer and it worked just as it should, nooo problems. But of course... it didn't behave as a good boy in FFXI. The sticks and the hat switch works, so does the 4 (triangle) button, but not the others rofl! It just makes no sense to me. And no... it's not broken, I've tested it and it works perfectly fine.
So...
I fired up controllermate and manually mapped the missing button functions to keyboard keys, which I know would work together with the default keys in FFXI. So this way I got the full functionality of my gamepad back, which is good. But for the love of God this game is one that is definitely NOT worth it. I struggle for 20 mins launching and relaunching POL to 'try' to get in, and I do if I'm lucky (guess it's luck, who knows). And when quitting FFXI either by shutdown or logout to POL the game just freezes all together forcing you to quit CrossOver.

The game worked quite well in 7.1.2 and now it's just plain awful with bugs, so I'm really dissapointed with this update. I was thrilled when I learned that it'd support gamepads, but now that I got my hands dirty on it, it just plain sucks! One would expect CrossOver to get more and more compatible in terms of the games, but in this case it seems like it just breaks whatever compatibility you had, just like 7.2 did with FFXI.

If I could just log into POL normally without having to try a zillion times it'd be great! Because I can workaround the lacking gamepad compatibility now that the hatswitch and sticks are working like they should. Just need to map the buttons with controllermate, and that's dead easy and works like a charm.
ARGHHH!

My specs are:

Macbook Pro 4.2 version (late 2007).
Snow Leopard 10.6.1
CrossOver Games 8.0

FFXI, POL and all expansions installed without errors.
Bottle: WinVista
OffscreenrenderingMode added and set to fbo. (The key or folder called Direct3D did not exist where the dude that suggested this trick said it would, therefore I created it and added a keyvalue to that folder, called it OffscreenrenderingMode and and wrote it's value fbo in the value.
Apps:
DirectX Modern
Core Fonts
CrossOver HTML Engine
MSN XML Parser 3.0

dxdiag set to native windows
emulate desktop 1000x800
allow window mamager to control and decorate

Have you tried the fixes listed in the Tips & Tricks section?

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=22;tips=1

Such as setting pol.exe to run in winVista instead of winXP? Sounds like this might help what you are seeing quite a bit.

Thanks for the quick reply, I appreciate it.
Yeah I tried adding and running the pol.exe as WinVista. But it didn't seem to do any difference.
My bottle in which the game is is actually WinVista, are you suggesting I delete this and put the game in an XP bottle?

Upon launching POL I see the emulated dekstop all black for a flash of a sec, which is expected. When the POL attempt to launch I see, for a tenth of a second or so, a flash of screwed up graphics from what seems to be the background of my desktop at times, and other times the POL itself, but it's only like fragment of graphics in the frame where the POL viewer should load. Am I making sense here? And everytime whether or not I get the POL viewer to actually show itself I get the message 'the program pol.exe has encountered a serious problem and has to close, we are sorry for the inconvience' this can be caused by a problem in the program or a defiancy in wine...' and so on.
I then click close button on the message and then sometimes the POL shows itself and I can proceed, but mostly it just stays on black screen there, and pressing the close button of the window doesn't do it, I need to quit the entire CrossOver Games app.

When I disconnect my gamepad before launching the POL it seems like I get in more often, but I still get crashes, it doesn't make much sense I am afraid :( maybe I am just wishing too hard and the gamepad makes no difference I am not sure.
I sure would like to get rid of this problem though, because the times I have gotten into the game it has worked brilliantly! Much more stable and improved graphics from last version of CXG, and the gamepad solution I worked out works perfect!

Did you add the registry key for 'OffscreenRenderingMode' and set it to 'fbo'?

The setup that is suggested in the tips in tricks is to run in a winXP bottle with POL.exe set to run as winVista. I don't know how much of a difference it will make (I actually haven't tried myself), but I remembered reading the postings about it very recently. I would try adding the registry key (if you have not) before changing around your bottle type and/or reinstalling.

8.1 fixes these issues, if you notice issues in 8.1 please make a new thread.

Locked.