Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD External File Loader

Here is something I made almost two years ago, but forgot to upload on Nexus. This is a solution that enables reading unpacked files from a directory instead of the VBF archive. This means your game files are always left unchanged, installing and uninstalling mods takes much less time and you can easily restore original game with a single click. It's pretty much a port of basic FF12 External File Loader for FFX/X-2.

In fact it consists of two separate applications bundled together for ease of use.

Source code available at https://gitlab.com/ffgriever/ffx-x-2-hd-external-file-loader

FF10 Module Loader

A library that allows native (.dll) modules to be loaded upon starting the game and enable various features that ease the usage, installation and management of mods (but modules are not limited to that).

Requirements: Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable (x86)

The module loader basically hijacks dinput8.dll, so it's compatible with UnX (which hijacks dxgi). This means both types of mods can be used at the same time.


FF10 External File Loader

It's a new, improved way to install mods. It allows the game to read unpacked files from a directory instead of the VBF archive. It doesn't require any modifications to the big, 16/19GB VBF files. It's also faster and safer. If needed, vanilla game state (including unmodified archives) can be restored within seconds. It is strongly recommended to use this method instead of traditional VBF repacking. You can also literally unpack the whole VBF archives and then remove the VBF files if you want. It also comes with a few configuration settings like logging file access or a mod load order (see below for more details).

It's a module for the mentioned above module loader.

How to Install:

• Unpack contents of the archive into game's main directory (where FFX.exe and FFX-2.exe are), replacing files if asked.
• If you want, change the configuration to fit your needs.
• By default the mods go into data/mods/ directory, with paths exactly the same as in the VBF archive.
  

E.g When changing FFX font, you just put a file into:
data/mods/ffx_data/gamedata/ps3data/fonts/d3d11/tuffy.fgen.phyre
just as it was in the VBF.

Configuration

{Game directory}/hook.ini


; FF10 module loader configuration file. Only ANSI and UTF16 encoding supported!
; Unless specified otherwise, all relative paths start in game's main directory

[general]
; If set to true, [modules] section contains list of specific modules to load
; rather than list of directories
disableAutoLoad=false

; List of paths to autoload modules from. If no entry is specified or the config
; file is missing, defaults to single path "modules". If disableAutoLoad is set
; to true, it has to contain list of complete module paths rather than
; directories
[modules]
default=modules

[log]
; Do not allocate console nor send anything to stdout
disableConsole=true
; Disable creating and writing to a file log
disableFile=false
; Set log file path
logFile=hook.log


and {Game directory}/modules/config/ff10-file-loader.ini

[General]
; Allow the games to run without VBF archives at all
; If set to true, whole archives have to be unpacked.
allowNoVBF = false

[Logging]
; Change this value, if you want the loader to print all files that are accessed
; by the game.
logAccess=false

; Simply add new paths here. Each causes additional IO, so try not to have too
; many of them. Key name doesn't matter. Both absolute and relative paths are
; supported. Relative path start in game's main directory. Paths higher on the
; list have priority.
[Paths]
mods=data/mods


So you can have separate folders for each of the games, eg.:
ffxmods=data/ffxmods
ffx2mods=data/ffx2mods
or even an additional directory for the mod you're working on, directly in your working dir, eg.:
my_mod=f:\workdir\my_mod\data