reShade / GShade allowed?

[Jin-]

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.

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

[Packetdancer]

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

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.)

[Ryaz]

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.

[EmmetOtter]

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.

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.

[Eriane_Elis]

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.

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.

[MsMisato]

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.

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.

[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. 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.

[Packetdancer]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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!