I was advised this was possibly the best place to make a thread about an issue that seems to have started affecting quite a few players over the past week.
Players started noticing when they loaded their games ReShade wasn't present. Upon investigation, it seems that the ReShade dll (which is the file that injects ReShade into the game process, enabling it to work) is being deleted when the game is opened.
Further investigation suggests this is linked directly to the version of EA App that ends with the version number 6019. For the moment, not all players have this version of the app, and they are unaffected. Additionally, if affected players uninstall EA App and then redownload it, it is reverting back to a previous version (usually ending 6009), and ReShade works again for them. Eventually, however, for some EA App will silently update in the background to the new version again, and the dll is deleted again.
We are assuming this is the result of some sort of anti-cheat that has been added to EA App, which has caught up The Sims 4 by accident. Obviously TS4 isn't an online competitive game, and it's one where cheating is positively encouraged, as is of course modding and using custom content. We think, therefore, that it must be a mistake that TS4 is subject to this (if it is, in fact, what's causing the problem in the first place).
It would be useful to get confirmation from EA and/or Maxis about the cause of this, if it is indeed because of anti-cheat, and whether we can find a path to exempting ReShade for TS4 (via a whitelist - which may need updating each time a new version of ReShade is released). Players of other games have in the past been successful in getting ReShade whitelisted, and we hope that if indeed that's what's happening here it can be the case for us too.
Note: this seems to be happening across Windows versions, across GPU vendors, and through a process of elimination seems solely linked to the 6019 version of EA App.
For background: ReShade is a free tool that allows players to add post-processing effects to their games (think a little like Instagram filters). It is widely used and respected across hundreds if not thousands of games, and has been around for a decade (even longer if you count its precursor, SweetFX). ReShade has over the years gained a huge user base among Sims players, so much so that there has been a lot of anguish over the prospect of not being able to use it anymore. For a game that has such a vibrant and active fan base that revolves around making visual content - either through videos or screenshots - as well as countless modders and custom content creators using it, being able to continue to use ReShade is very important to them. In many respects, ReShade can be thought of as the biggest and most popular TS4 mod.
