Just give us a list of what addons we can use.

[MintnHoney]

No, gshade is also against the ToS.

YoshiP stated otherwise.

[Vahlnir]

YoshiP stated otherwise.

Years ago, yeah. An update would be nice after the announcement yesterday.

[Kyrj]

YoshiP stated otherwise.

He's said a lot of things....

[Ranaku]

YoshiP stated otherwise.

Yeah well i know of one statement of a community representative, Hvinire said it would be alright i think.

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.

There we go. Yeah that seems to be a problem since it is not clarified anywhere that these are alright. Which makes it really...well...unsafe cause they can decide without giving any notice that it's now not allowed anymore.

But yeah, reshade and gshade don't interact with the gamedata itself i believe but work through directx itself. Thus it doesn't interact with the gamedata itself BUT gshade as far as i know uses an overlay system for the game which would mean it does interact with gamedata since it starts automatically as soon as the game starts. Which would be a modification of the installation folder which would be, i say probably cause we don't know how SE sees this, probably a violation. But yeah that is speculation, we don't know it and it would be nice to get some fresh statements from the dev team/SE.

[Packetdancer]

Yeah well i know of one statement of a community representative, Hvinire said it would be alright i think.

In 2013, I will note. I've pointed out that post myself on various occasions in the past, but we should recognize that the policy may have changed since then.

But yeah, reshade and gshade don't interact with the gamedata itself i believe but work through directx itself. Thus it doesn't interact with the gamedata itself BUT gshade as far as i know uses an overlay system for the game which would mean it does interact with gamedata since it starts automatically as soon as the game starts.

The super-simplified version of how ReShade or GShade works is by replacing either the Direct 3D or DXGI DLLs with their own version. That version mostly just passes things through to DirectX, but takes the opportunity to do post-processing on the actual output framebuffer. The in-game overlay is not, technically, happening in the game code, but in the DirectX pipeline.

However, it is happening in the game's process; the way it intercepts and proxies DirectX is by putting its own DLL in the game's folder; programs will load their own local version of DirectX before falling back to the system one, which means the game goes to load DirectX and loads the shader system instead (which then loads DirectX on the game's behalf).

The practical upshot of which is that ReShade cannot modify the game's actual operating code in any way, but it can modify the framebuffer after the game is done with it. (Which is how the menu overlay for ReShade works; it's just stamped on top of the end result of the game's rendering code.)

Conversely, Nvidia's Freestyle (their own ReShade equivalent, albeit with far fewer built-in shaders and a maximum of 4 presets) happens down in Nvidia's driver layer, meaning the code for Freestyle is not actually in the FFXIV process; arguably, it falls into the same area as monitor color calibration and such.

So if you really wanted to get nitpicky on the technical details, it would be possible for them to say ReShade and its forks are formally prohibited, but still allow Freestyle.

I do not think they're likely to enforce the ToS against ReShade/GShade, no. Aesthetic mods that do not alter the game's operation are unlikely to be high-value targets for enforcement, I'd imagine.

But that doesn't mean I think it would be super smart to stream while using it, because I can absolutely imagine people maliciously reporting people, and I don't think anyone's put to the test how hard the hammer will come down if they're forced to go pay attention to something instead of allowing it to skate beneath the radar.

(Whereas if you're posting just images, there's some degree of plausible deniability. Even if they know you probably used ReShade or GShade, if they're not super keen on enforcing it they can easily dismiss it with "Well, it might've been a normal unchanged screenshot they did things to in Photoshop.")