While I don't really play FFXI anymore, I've had this idea for a project in my head for many years. When I was playing heavily, there were two things about the extended third party ecosystem for FFXI that I really just hated, and wanted to fix:
FFXIAH profiles stopped syncing at some point
Guildwork tried to fix this, but the solution was short lived
Model viewer apps were *** - ancient, not updated, don't work on modern OS, etc.
AltanaView is as good as it gets, but hasn't been updated in ~5 years, and never had the ability to view zone/area models
For a long time I had decided against working on this project simply because the lack of public documentation for reading the FFXI DAT files. There's a handful of modding projects over the years that have taken stabs at it - one project has examples for reading macro DATs, another has examples for reading armor DATs, another reads animation DATs, etc. The required information is heavily scattered across the internet, and really hard to find, if it's available at all.
For an app I can't monetize targeting a small audience for a ~25 year old game, it just didn't seem worth the effort.
Claude Code changed that math, though, and finally made this project feasible for me to spend time working on. So I reactivated my FFXI account. And for the last few weeks, I've had the agents running 24/7 in the background, tasked with solving those two things I hated about the third party ecosystem for FFXI.
I think I succeeded. And I added a lot more in the process.
Check it out here: https://vanalytics.soverance.com
YouTube Preview: https://youtu.be/y1VTa2PEeGI
Source Code: https://github.com/Soverance/VanalyticsYour text to link here...
It's not perfect - I am aware of numerous bugs and issues, and there is still a lot of polish to apply. For example, there's a number of items that don't currently have linked DAT models, and there are some issues related to lighting and rendering transparencies. But it's a pretty good start, and I'm accepting pull requests, from anyone who wishes to contribute.
Be sure to let me know what you think!
