I'm getting somewhere with this. I'm currently at work with a notepad jotting down a procedure going forward.
What has been done:
Aali's driver has been stripped of FF8 support and non-English support and merged into The Reunion. It will work with my own DLL only - and the two provide full bug fixes, with Aali's side obviously mainly doing the graphical fixes - such as Open GL support. If anyone wants to look at my code to add some of it to Aali's original source, they are welcome to. My version of Aali's dll is tailor made for how I want to do things.
His "driver" is now named aali.dll and works with my own dll - loaded at game start (ddraw.dll)
Even though only the English exe is supported, it is easily possible to support other languages because of how I am arranging things. Lots of plans afoot.
Window.bin has been abolished and is not loaded (the font spacing table is instead loaded from an external text file that users can mod easily - If file exists - otherwise default English applies).
All original music and audio files have been abolished and are not loaded - including original midi support. All Audio (apart from FMV audio) is handled now by my dll.
This means the files related to above are completely redundant and can be deleted.
Additionally, the temp .p files from startup are now written and read from \data and not from root. Still have no idea what these are and they are only used on startup. Written to disk, read from disk - and that's it. Waste of time. If you deliberately avoid the write / read then the game loads to the debug screen. There was definitely no need to write these to disk... could have all been done in memory. I disabled the write and made it read only as a test and it works. That's not ideal because it's too easy for one of those .p files to vanish, I suppose.
- field screen is centred - including FMV. Down side is I think this needs to happen across all modules so the game looks consistent. Certainly the Menu could benefit from it. But that's an awful lot of work at this point. Perhaps I should have planned ahead
But then again a lot of this is trial and error. It's been a lot more involved than I ever imagined possible.
I am trying to make as much of The Reunion's mods as global as possible.
Audio Replacement will work with all user mods already. So will the Frame Limiter, which is now mandatory (Aali's version has been removed in favour of my own).
Soldier Quest could probably be made global but will need the wizardry of Luksy.
Model Overhaul should be global [note as always these mods are all optional]
Menu Enhancement currently only supports Beacause. I am having a big think about this but I don't seem to be able to rectify the logic of it all in my head.
Beacause + script fixes also come together. The work needed to make script fixes completely separate as a mod is just too big. I guess I have to cut my losses at some point.
So a big problem with why this mod still isn't released is the internal conflicts in my brain with how these mods all interact together.
The config file Aali used has been simplified with some stuff stripped out. It's been merged with my own config file. At moment, I am trying to fix up Aali's 3rd party config parser to work with mine properly. It's overly bloated code and a nuisance - as everything in C seems to be. I've stripped about as much out of Aali's driver as I can in favour of my own Delphi code and dll for that very reason.
60fps mod is global and the interpolated version optional also.
There's way too much going on at moment.... So many mods and fixes and conflicts that my brain is about to crash.
edit. Above info was wrong.