reShade / GShade allowed?

[Nadjira]

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

[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.

[Alleluia]

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.

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.

[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.

[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.)

[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!

[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.

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.

[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]

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.