GTA Vice City & KotOR The Sith Lords issues

Just wanted to inform about the issues I have with both of these games:

GTA Vice City (d3d8):

The game initially starts by playing 2 intro movies, one for Rockstar, the other for the game. The screen is completely black until these are over with. When I click to skip the movies, momentarily for the last one playing I see a frame of the movie being played before it cuts to the menu at which point the ReShade "compiling shaders" notification finally appears in the top left corner.

My reading of this is that ReShade starts but then hangs with a black screen until the game proper starts at which point it can continue on with compiling shaders and actually displaying a game frame buffer that isn't black (or blank) because the game isn't generating one yet. If you follow.

KotOR The Sith Lords (opengl32):

There are 2 issues here; first one is a long standing issue to do with using certain SweetFX shader files with the game which results in a completely black screen. I'm assuming also that if I were to use the SweetFX bundle of ReShade, that it would be completely black no matter what was turned on or off.

The second is not so much an issue but more of a cosmetic concern that interferes with immersion. Basically, this is an old game, and as such, it's one of those that uses real-time in-game cutscenes along with prerendered videos. It will switch back and forth between these a couple of times in fact. When it switches back to in-game, I get the ReShade "compiling shaders" message again, and every time.

Is there a way of turning these off or perhaps flagging it so that it only ever does this once per game start..?

The intro videos in GTA Vice City (which is common for old games) aren't rendered with Direct3D. Haven't tested what it is, but I'd guess it's DirectDraw or GDI, which ReShade doesn't understand and thus the overlay can only start as soon as the game switches over to Direct3D rendering. For why it is black I don't know, considering that ReShade shouldn't really interfer since it doesn't understand it.
Yeah, the OpenGL black screen bug with SweetFX is something I really need to investigate. I was able to find out how it is blacking out the screen, just not why yet.
A flag for forcing shader compilation to be a one time job would be nice, but is not possible with Direct3D as far as I know. Changing resolution etc. requires to reset the entire Direct3D device, meaning all resources must be deleted and recreated afterwards, which includes the shaders ReShade produces for the effects. I asume the cutscenes are again not rendered via Direct3D and thus the device is destroyed, cutscene is rendered and the device is recreated, meaning ReShade is forced to recompile in order to allow rendering at all.

I think it would be DirectDraw, especially for a 3D game; I don't think anyone would use GDI for playing movies, except perhaps for "multimedia" applications that are 2D. As for the black screen, I don't understand enough about how ReShade does it's post-processing thing but it seems like if it were really an "overlay" then making sure that the overlay's alpha component to all the pixels are initially set to transparent, if there is no game frame being received or processed yet, would mean that anything underneath would appear through.

However, something tells me that injecting a frame to draw to the screen doesn't work that way...

Re: KotOR TSL: Can the ReShade notification be flagged on/off via a parameter?

I know it is an important notification as it tells you without a doubt that it is working along with giving the author credit for their work, but, it does interfere with immersion considerably when you get a notification appearing several times via an extended cutscene .

BTW: another detail for KotOR TSL is that along with the ReShade notification, I also get the in-game mouse cursor appearing; if I understand the post-processing going on, then if it were a completely black screen I shouldn't be getting any cursor at all as this would be "drawn" before ReShade does its thing. So ReShade is not creating the black screen but rather is receiving a black screen from the game -- even if ReShade (or SweetFX) is the cause of it.

Just thought I'd add that in case it was something you weren't aware of.

ReShade only actually draws if the game draws also, which is why I'm a bit surprised that the intro videos are pitch black. ReShade should simply ignore them. Same is true for the mouse cursor, there is nothing I'm aware of that could make a mouse cursor appear, really strange thing.
The black screen in game appears because ReShade clears the framebuffer to black before rendering, which is required for some effects like SMAA. For some reason that drawing fails however (but it fails silently, no error from OpenGL, nothing, which complicates debugging a little).

For Vice City the game may actually be displaying a black screen with the movies then being displayed on top. If that's the case then ReShade may be simply drawing what the game has provided. The weird part though would be why the notification is only displayed and "finalized" once the movies are done with.

I guess it could be the case that once the movies start (and DirectDraw is invoked) it blocks the notification and compiling of shaders and is simply passing on the existing (black) game frame unprocessed..?

Though, I really am guessing here.

As far as I know, the blackscreen movies are a general problem on Vista and newer. The same problem also goes for San Andreas. I don't think ReShade has anything to do with it (Don't quote me on that).

I once changed the compatibility for GTA SA to Windows 98 and the movies worked, made the game slower ofcourse. I didn't try this trick on Vice City, tho.

If the problem only occurs when ReShade is enabled, then the problem is due to ReShade. Otherwise, I would assume that the problem is elsewhere .