Regarding the Disablement of Online Depth Buffer.

I was discussing this on a different forum and we hit a dead end without 'developer-grade' knowledge.


We agreed that very bad things would happen if someone used the injector and some type of customized 'evil' shader to exploit the depth buffer access in a competitive online game if it didn't disable itself naturally.
But the question is whether or not an incredibly strict whitelist would suffice.
Say you wanted to use some customized SSAO in your favorite RTS game. I find it very hard to use the stock martymcfly's ambient occlusion shader to get any kind of depth-related benefit besides looking nice. The only people who could 'find' anything would be the same people who run the game at minimum settings because they believe getting at least 400fps makes a difference.
This would instill the question of what would happen should someone replace the example shader, Ambient Occlusion by McFly, with the 'evil' custom one. Would that make it so whenever the white-listed Ambient Occlusion was called, the 'evil' shader that replaced it would load instead? Could it differentiate the two? To that, I have no answer, as my 'developer' knowledge is limited.


Also, why does the 'color' tag not work? It's not obvious that the phrase "different forum" is actually a link, now.
The 'bold' tag not working doesn't help, either. : P

Shader file whitelisting? Guess it could work if you used some hash check or similar on the shader files but that seems a bit overkill almost or how to say though yeah being able to use effects like AO or DOF and such in games like for example various MMO's would be neat.

Though there's no protection on the actual .dll so modifying that and removing said check would be pretty easy I assume so I don't see it happening or the current stance on depth buffer access in online games changing anytime soon.
(That's a bit like the unlocker used to do which operated on a whitelist for I think it was Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online and possibly one or two other games.)

It's not possible for ReShade to detect a single effect. Right now all effects are loaded via a single file, so they cannot be distinguished. While this changes with 3.0, it's still hard to figure out good vs. bad edits.
It also goes against ReShade's design, which is to give shader developers as much freedom as possible and not restrict them. So, not happening.

crosire wrote: *smart stuff*

Yes, that makes sense. It was just a curious thought that crossed my mind, and I didn't see it addressed anywhere else.
Thank you for the response.


I look forwards to this '3.0' you mention.