Why is it basically mandatory if most mods aren't compatible with it? As a non-modder i'm just left scratching my head trying to figure out why texture mods aren't working and messing about with the config file because there's no documentation saying they don't work... only to find out weeks later through a forum that they don't work in the first place
You're right on that side. The forum organization maybe is not clear enough, but at the current state for FF7 is the only active mod platform supported on Qhimm ( which doesn't mean is the only one existing that mods FF7
), and which also exposes a set of features which make it really unique compared to other mod solutions.
About FF8 though in fact there are different mods available, each one of them doing different things ( but not all of them combined ). FF8_Demastered for eg. is the known mod solution for FF8R, Tonberry is the only solution known to replace textures on FF8 2000/2013 releases, and FFNx is a complete mod platform which reimplements the graphic pipeline ( so it's not depending on the core game engine, unlike Tonberry ) and introduces new unique features never seen before.
Now, as an author and crew member of FFNx as you can see, the project is not only developed by me but there are contributors bringing new patch codes introducing new features ( see
https://github.com/julianxhokaxhiu/FFNx/graphs/contributors ) and because of this it's difficult to document really everything, considering the fact people might forget it but we're all doing this in our own spare time. No one of us is paid, receiveing donations nor asking for them. All we do is bring our passion for the game to the code, trying to find new ways to enable then modders to bring their magic in. Sometimes we manage to do so, sometimes we fail
But that's the beauty of it.
Speaking therefore about texture replacement, I'll never get tired repeating this: I wish we could have it on FFNx, but unfortunately the code to allow this is much more difficult than FF7 in terms of Reverse Engineering, nor Square-Enix and dotEmu are helping on this case sharing knowledge with us on how they did. If this will one day happen, rest assured we will be happy to explore that path and add support, but for now it's really difficult to understand the game code and rewire everything.