Goodbye GShade

Another week, another scandal involving mods in Final Fantasy XIV. Last week involved the use of a zoom hack by the winner of the world first race for The Omega Protocol. This week saw the developer of the popular GShade graphics program for FFXIV and other games basically kill his own project.

GShade was a heavily modified fork of ReShade, an open source, generic post-processing injector for games and video software. GameRant broke the news in the gaming press of the GShade developer adding a bit of malware to his project to teach another third-party dev a lesson.

This is the dev of GSHADE admitting to turning it into malware, saying they could easily have coded it to do anything they wanted, but chose just a restart.

This is not okay, y'all. https://t.co/WdSsrZ4BmB

— ✨ Rory, soup-related crises 🍲˙⊙. - 6.3 spoilers (@GutterSnipeXIV) February 6, 2023

At this point trust was broken and people started uninstalling GShade. One of the biggest FFXIV resources, r/ffxiv and the Reddit Discord server stopped endorsing the use of the program.

r/ffxiv now no longer endorses gshade because of this. https://t.co/Z52J6sHMG9 pic.twitter.com/Rfv4k1fF8S

— Adira (@toruadira) February 6, 2023

Yesterday Eurogamer reported that Github removed the GShade repository from the hosting service. I logged onto my Github account and confirmed the report.

So the Gshade stuff has a new development:
Gshade is fucking dead. The Github is GONE, following a github investigation.

Which means that all current, unmodified installs of Gshade are bricked. pic.twitter.com/hZs5cCUOsq

— Ehud Kurzweil → 🐵 (@KabscOrner) February 7, 2023

I also saw the screen in the above tweet because I was a GShade user. So instead of getting all my weekly gathering in FFXIV done last night, I spent some of my time uninstalling GShade and installing ReShade in its place. 

Fortunately some instructions were already floating around on how to move from GShade to ReShade. I followed the instructions and managed to install ReShade successfully. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on fiddling with settings, so I chose the OMGEorzea Gameplay setting running in performance mode. I experienced 60 fps while running around gathering last night. Below is a screenshot of my new indoor garden using ReShade.

My indoor garden, pic taken with ReShade

I don't like using mods, but a graphics mod didn't seem like a big risk. But one never knows when a developer might decide to change what is in their software. People can use a mod safely for years and then GShade happens.