[GameDev] Making my game Reshade friendly?

I'm working on a game right now which I can't talk about, but one of my desires for this game is to make it modder-friendly in every single way.

So this is for Reshade authors: what can I do on my end to add as much function and simplicity as possible to users of Reshade?

Thanks for your time.

There's really nothing special you need to do, as long as you use Direct3D 9/10/11 or OpenGL for rendering. If you want to make it easier for ReShade to find the depth buffer (so effects like DOF, MXAO, ... work), try to use only one depth texture during the majority of your scene rendering.

Man, this is amazing. I hope your game does well. Make sure to post again when you can talk about it. Also, if you can, make the guys release the game on every platform and let the player, the buyer, decide where to buy... ahha o/

I would like to add -- though this isn't possible unless Crosire also adds a feature:

Make it possible to communicate to Reshade the UI overlay such that Reshade (or shaders) can ignore it. Simple case in point: not having Reshade SMAA/FXAA applied to UI elements but to everything else, though its general usage scenarios would be vast. Another example would be prevening MXAO showing through the overlay etc.

Gedosato had a method to intercept which shader was drawing a UI overlay and not apply effects to it. However, it required users to test when the overlay was rendered and pinpoint it in the pipeline. If there was a static way to allow Reshade to consistently pick up the UI overlay (at least for your game) that would be incredible.

Thanks for dropping by, very much appreciated. I'd say as well, depth buffer access is often a problem, and keeping the HUD elements unaffected by ReShade would be great. Also the option to turn off any unwanted shaders / effects, such as bloom, film grain, chromatic aberration etc. that gamers might want to implement on their own with ReShade. This would save precious GPU power and make for a cleaner end result, because nobody needs two AOs or blooms or AAs on top of one another.

I guess this is rather a topic for making ReShade into a middle-ware to be used explicitly by developers anywhere they want. It would be awesome though, most reshade default shaders can be really competitive there (especially Bloom and MXAO)

Yes, MagicBloom is a blessing, throwing out the cheap bloom blobs in games of the middle 2000s and replacing them with a proper bloom.

Thank you guys for all the suggestions. I'm not a big game exec unfortunately, I'm indie, but I do hope we set out certain mod-ability standards that the rest of the industry can/should copy.

@crosire, do I have your permission to have our installer automatically download the latest version of Reshade and install it for the game? I have a few ideas regarding this and would like Reshade to be a non-optional part of the game.

The game is indie, and currently our model is non-profit, but if we chose the profit route I would be more than happy to enter some sort of legal agreement/contract in order to rightfully share a percentage of profits. If we would go the for-profit route, it would be a long time from now.

Sure, go ahead. If for whatever reason you're forced to distribute the ReShade binaries instead of downloading them during installation, you'll just have to add a copy of ReShade's license somewhere in your package as per github.com/crosire/reshade/blob/master/LICENSE.md .

Great I have one final question and then I'm good-to-go: MXAO and other depth-based effects, is there anything I can do to make sure effects like these work better with effects such as fog? I love MXAO but I know when I was using it in Hitman 2 the other day I ended up turning it off because of the particle/fog/(transparency) issues. I know it's hard to work around such a thing. I'm thinking what might be done, is expose all shader variables to the end user so they can use them in whatever creative way they want.
I'd honestly just post the raw HLSL shaders in a directory with the game, but from experience I know a lot of people don't know how to properly mess with this stuff, so it could make our troubleshooting easier by forcing people to use Reshade in a way (I'm a modder as well, and I can tell you, the error logs/lack of error logs from shader issues, as well as horribly written shaders, can be a big headache).

ReShade currently always runs at the end of the frame, so after your game finished rendering everything (including fog etc.). For MXAO to not affect those ReShade would have to render at some point during the frame. There is no support for that currently and since there is no communication API between game and ReShade there is no way for the game to tell ReShade when to render right. I will need to implement both in case this becomes an issue.