reShade / GShade allowed?

Hi Folks,
recently we had a big discussion about reshade and if its allowed.

Little fact round (I am pro GShade because the game looks so much better with it):

• reShade injects itself into directX to alter and add shaders to the render pipeline
• reShade is not altering or analysing any game files, it operates after the game is passed to the video card - therefore as against the TOS as nVidia Graphic driver or Discord overlay.
• nVidia is using an alternate version of reshade in their driver to enhance the view
• Some RTS games ban for actively using reShade because it is an unfair advantage (i.e. Fortnite) - some shader can sharpen the picture so that you can react faster
• 2013 Robert "Hvinire" Peeler (Community rep) wrote: Utilizing such a tool would not violate any agreements customers have with Square Enix, and we don't plan on doing anything to restrict users from accessing it.
  Source: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post1408111

Mentioning this in the novice chat leaded to a cruxification.
The consent at the end was Hvinire has no say it just his opinion as long as Yoshida himself does not say "it is allowed" its worthless in their view and if fortnite bans for it, it should be banned in FF14...

So please is there any official statement apart from the quote from 2013?

Cheers thank you :)

I mean... NVidia has their own fork of ReShade included in GeForce Experience (under the name "Freestyle"), and FFXIV is one of the officially-supported games. (Scroll down to spot it, the list of games is Very Long.) You can even import additional/custom ReShade shaders into Freestyle by dropping them in the appropriate directory.

So if you're running GeForce Experience and have the feature turned on, congrats, you're *already* running ReShade; you could hit the hotkey and bring up the Freestyle interface in-game *right now*.

Anyway, if ReShade variants were expressly forbidden, I suspect Square-Enix would not have allowed FFXIV to be one of the officially-supported games for Freestyle.

From my limited understanding, the low tolerance of mods stems from the console players having no access to them, thus asking players to play on the same standards.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hvinire

Utilizing such a tool would not violate any agreements customers have with Square Enix, and we don't plan on doing anything to restrict users from accessing it.

However, we advise that players use this at their own risk. Square Enix does not regulate the content of the aforementioned add-on and will not be responsible for any damage or losses resulting from its use.

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I feel like people keep asking the same question over and over again. Every interview, Yoshi P touches on this subject. Third party tools like reshade are fine. Tools that give an unfair advantage such as housing bots, market bots, gathering bots, AOE overlays or whatever they are called, things like that is not allowed. Cosmetic things are fine but as he says, just be quiet about it. I don't use it because my FPS would drop to 10 if I even tried lol FF14 isn't a competitive FPS, sharpening images won't make you play better. Yoshi P has even stated that parsers aren't bad per-se, but it can bring toxicity to the community so they won't be officially endorsed.

I'm just going to say this. Hvinire would not have posted that response unless he got the OK from SE hq in Japan. That message went through yoship and possibly even their legal team before it was posted.

Keep in mind, SE's default position is no third party app is allowed; thats just a legal standpoint they can point to when necessary if they need to go after someone using it. Yoshi's default position has always been as long as you're not a d**k about using something and its not hurting anyone then he doesn't really care. He'll never come out and say they're officially allowed but they aren't going to go after anyone for it. I suppose if you were to try and use reshade to somehow harass someone with it on a stream then they might come after you...but thats kinda stretching things.

This game has a large community of modders, housing designers and gposers (...that last sounded better in my head) and yoshi has stated repeatedly that he enjoys seeing the things people have on display. I don't think he's going to want to do something to stifle those communities unless we (the playerbase) push him into a corner and make him do it.

Technically: no. Square's official policy is no third party tools are allowed.

But its unlikely they'd go after someone using them unless they were shouting "I USE GSHADE, LOOK AT ME"; and even then, it'd have to be a super slow day for them to really care, since reshade/Ghsade are just graphical adjustment programs. Same thing as parsers; don't tell or show.

Meanwhile parsers ARE against ToS outright and usage is punishable, as there were reports of harassment towards players with low parser numbers. Actually, I think Stone, Sea, Sky was added as an alternative for parsers because of said harassment and console players.

The long and short of it is don’t do anything that will negatively impact other players. Which is reasonable.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

I mean... NVidia has their own fork of ReShade included in GeForce Experience (under the name "Freestyle"), and FFXIV is one of the officially-supported games. (Scroll down to spot it, the list of games is Very Long.) You can even import additional/custom ReShade shaders into Freestyle by dropping them in the appropriate directory.

So if you're running GeForce Experience and have the feature turned on, congrats, you're *already* running ReShade; you could hit the hotkey and bring up the Freestyle interface in-game *right now*.

Anyway, if ReShade variants were expressly forbidden, I suspect Square-Enix would not have allowed FFXIV to be one of the officially-supported games for Freestyle.

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I definitely, hypothetically use this to increase the color saturation in the game. I swear it used to be brighter and they toned it down at some point. My character's hair hasn't changed colors but its not nearly as vibrant as it used to be.

My only worry about them allowing this is how it might make them not want to improve the game's anti-aliasing and adding other shaders to the game natively to the game. While plug-ins like reshad/nvidia freestyle are great, they are not native to the client itself, and they should seriously upgrade the game's shaders going into further expansions, mainly as an introduction to ps5 to get even more people into upgrading.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

I mean... NVidia has their own fork of ReShade included in GeForce Experience (under the name "Freestyle"), and FFXIV is one of the officially-supported games. (Scroll down to spot it, the list of games is Very Long.) You can even import additional/custom ReShade shaders into Freestyle by dropping them in the appropriate directory.

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Interesting. I'll have to check this out since Freestyle by default feels like a poor man's Reshade

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Originally Posted by Jin-

Interesting. I'll have to check this out since Freestyle by default feels like a poor man's Reshade

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It's worth noting that Freestyle diverged from ReShade a couple of revisions back; Freestyle doesn't support ReShade's new "compute shaders" feature, and Freestyle has some interesting machine-learning driven functionality that ReShade does not. (Though the "Style Transfer" feature seems to be locked back behind a debugging panel right now, it still does surface in a few of the Freestyle-specific shaders.) Despite that, somewhere around 80% of the ReShade shaders I've tried will work under Freestyle as well; it even pulls in the configuration UI properly and stuffs it into the Freestyle panel.

The main limitations I've found where Freestyle is concerned are that 1. you cannot import ReShade *presets* directly, and 2. Freestyle only lets you save a very limited number of presets, compared to ReShade's "hey, fill your hard drive with presets if you want, that's your call."

(And also I cannot figure out how to force Freestyle to reload shaders while active, which makes it *extremely irritating* to try to write shaders and tweak your code on the fly if you're doing so using Freestyle. But that's likely more a Packetdancer irritation than a general-user irritation.)

Reshade they've always said was fine as it doesn't alter anything within the game itself. Cosmetic mods are usually fine if you're quiet about it, but SEs official stance is no because some deviants use NSFW mods and can put the game at risk of backlash.

Thats said, reshades for the most part are limited to screenshots and the like due to the taxing nature on computer resources. There are a couple that are game play viable, though, that do things like just brightening up colors a bit.

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Originally Posted by MorionQ

From my limited understanding, the low tolerance of mods stems from the console players having no access to them, thus asking players to play on the same standards.

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Hacks, cheats and mods are very available to many console games. Most are unsupported and/or against ToS type of stuff. The last game I bought for myself had multiplayer mode problems in the first week because of hacked/modded characters.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MorionQ

Meanwhile parsers ARE against ToS outright and usage is punishable, as there were reports of harassment towards players with low parser numbers. Actually, I think Stone, Sea, Sky was added as an alternative for parsers because of said harassment and console players.

The long and short of it is don’t do anything that will negatively impact other players. Which is reasonable.

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Not true, even Yoshi P stated in an interview not too long ago that it doesn't violate ToS and he doesn't discourage its use, but rather discourage players from telling other players how bad they are. This part is what's in violation of the ToS -- shaming other players or telling other players how to play. This isn't to be mistaken to being a leader / mentor in a dungeon/trial/raid/etc... guiding people. For instance, telling people to run away after shooting the cannon at Livius wouldn't be a ToS violation unless you were a completely butt about it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alleluia

I definitely, hypothetically use this to increase the color saturation in the game. I swear it used to be brighter and they toned it down at some point. My character's hair hasn't changed colors but its not nearly as vibrant as it used to be.

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your character has aged.

nah but seriously. I was looking at some older screen shots back from 2.0 and you are right, the game use to be brighter and seem more vibrant.

AS for the OP. Reshade is fine, as everyone stated yoshi p says reshade is fine. But seriously even in the show your (race) threads people post there using reshade.

Personally I find color saturation, brightness, and contrast to be better through Nvidia's control control panel than through Reshade. Reshade is a constant battle of overdoing it and tinkering to achieve the impossible. The only thing I'd use Reshade/Gshade for would be for SMAA, other than that you could play around with digital vibrance, contrast, and brightness in the Nvidia control panel.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

Personally I find color saturation, brightness, and contrast to be better through Nvidia's control control panel than through Reshade. Reshade is a constant battle of overdoing it and tinkering to achieve the impossible.

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I mean, you can expose the same controls via ReShade/GShade shaders; the Nvidia control panel just constrains the values to a smaller—and perhaps somewhat more sensible—range than a lot of the Curves/Levels/etc. shaders for ReShade do. It would be trivial to make a shader that did the same constrained sliders as the Nvidia control panel does.

(There's a solid argument to be made that the Nvidia implementation for that one specific thing is more efficient, though; unlike ReShade, the control panel adjustments directly affect the rendered output from Nvidia's drivers rather than post-processing the frames.)

But most of my screenshot presets are either very small color adjustments to vibrance and contrast, or else things that are drastic visual changes like turning the game into an oil painting or pencil sketch for artistic screenshot work.

You're not wrong that a lot of people will really go overboard on tweaking colors in ReShade presets, though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

The only thing I'd use Reshade/Gshade for would be for SMAA, other than that you could play around with digital vibrance, contrast, and brightness in the Nvidia control panel.

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FWIW, at least some of the SMAA shaders out there for ReShade will import into Freestyle. So if you still wanted SMAA functionality solely in Nvidia's stuff which you presumably already have, without having to throw a dedicated ReShade install into the mix, you likely have an option there.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

It's worth noting that Freestyle diverged from ReShade a couple of revisions back; Freestyle doesn't support ReShade's new "compute shaders" feature, and Freestyle has some interesting machine-learning driven functionality that ReShade does not.

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Correction to my own post: I just heard a rumor this morning that the next revision of Freestyle pulls in more recent ReShade changes and thus will support compute shaders! Woo!