Retail Patcher and Login

Originally the retail version of the game used a built in patcher and login program to both update and start the game. The patcher consists of two programs ffxivboot.exe and ffxivupdater.exe. The login program is ffxivlogin.exe. Finally the actual game is ffxivgame.exe.

FFXIVBoot

This is the main application that is start when a user clicks on the "Final Fantasy XIV" shortcut. It facilitates version checking as well as patch downloading and verification. The patch downloader is a modified Bittorrent client, which causes problems with using non-ffxivboot clients. Interestingly ffxivboot was built on top of the Rapture engine and contains the same various RTTI info and referenced strings as the main ffxivgame executable. This was most likely to reuse the logic for rendering the Silverlight based UI, access game files, and to play the SCD music.

Version Check

The first thing ffxivboot does after initialization is perform a version check for both ffxivboot and ffxivgame programs. A GET HTTP request is made to ver01.ffxiv.com first for the boot program, followed by the game program. Both requests and responses have the same format.

/vercheck/ffxiv/win32/release/<game or boot>/<patchnumber>

If the version requested is up to date, the following is responded back:

header("HTTP/1.0 204 No Content");
header("Content-Location: ffxiv/2d2a390f/vercheck.dat");
header("X-Repository: ffxiv/win32/release/boot");
header("X-Patch-Module: ZiPatch");
header("X-Protocol: torrent");
header("X-Info-Url: http://www.example.com");
header("X-Latest-Version: 2012.09.19.0000");

If the version requested is out of date and an update is needed, the following is responded back:

header("HTTP/1.0 200 OK");
header("Content-Location: ffxiv/48eca647/vercheck.dat");
header("Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=477D80B1_38BC_41d4_8B48_5273ADB89CAC");
header("X-Repository: ffxiv/win32/release/boot");
header("X-Patch-Module: ZiPatch");
header("X-Protocol: torrent");
header("X-Info-Url: http://example.com");
header("X-Latest-Version: 2012.05.20.0000.0001");
header("Connection: keep-alive")

--477D80B1_38BC_41d4_8B48_5273ADB89CAC
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Content-Location: ffxiv/48eca647/metainfo/D2012.05.20.0000.0001.torrent
X-Patch-Length: 20874726
X-Signature: jqxmt9WQH1aXptNju6CmCdztFdaKbyOAVjdGw_DJvRiBJhnQL6UlDUcqxg2DeiIKhVzkjUm3hFXOVUFjygxCoPUmCwnbCaryNqVk_oTk_aZE4HGWNOEcAdBwf0Gb2SzwAtk69zs_5dLAtZ0mPpMuxWJiaNSvWjEmQ925BFwd7Vk=

[TORRENT FILE HERE]
--477D80B1_38BC_41d4_8B48_5273ADB89CAC--

Content-Location: Defines the location on the user's computer (in My Documents/My Games/Final Fantasy XIV/) where the patch file is stored. X-Respository: Either ffxiv/win32/release/boot or ffxiv/win32/release/game depending on what's being version checked. X-Patch-Module: Defines what format the patch file is in. FFXIV used ZiPatch. X-Protocol: Defines how the patch will be downloaded. While the client makes reference to http (and FFXIV ARR uses that), ffxivboot does not have code to download by http. X-Info-Url: Unknown but always set to ``http://example.com``. X-Latest-Version: The latest version of that program.