HUD Mask

Once a preset supports it, the HUD keeps the colours and brightness the game gave it while the effects work on the scene around it, and a compass, marker or menu no longer pulls eye adaptation around. Effects that don't read the mask run exactly as they would without the add-on, and it works the same with an SDR or an HDR swap chain.

How it works

The mask is bound as the texture semantic HUDMASK; its alpha says how much of each pixel the HUD covers. Games draw their HUD in one of two ways, and the add-on tells which on its own:

• []Into a texture of its own, merged with the scene at the end of the frame. That texture is the mask, translucent panels included.

  []Onto the frame, after the scene. The frame is copied just before the HUD is drawn and compared with the finished frame; wherever the HUD changed a pixel is the mask. D3D11 and D3D12.

  Effects that use it

  PHDRPlus reads the mask: its eye adaptation ignores the HUD, and the HUD comes out as the game drew it. Any effect can support it with a few lines; the details are in the README.

  Installing

  Requires ReShade 6. 8 or later with add-on support.

  • []Copy hudmask.addon64 next to the game's executable, where ReShade's DLL is, together with the game's hudmask.cfg if it has one.

    []In ReShade.ini, under , add it to LoadFromDllMain so it loads early enough to see the game create its HUD shaders. If another add-on is already listed, separate them with a comma:

  LoadFromDllMain=hudmask.addon64

  Finding a game's HUD

  The add-on knows no game by itself. Each game's HUD shaders are listed in a small hudmask.cfg beside it, which ships with presets that support it. To make one for any game, add this to its ReShade.ini:

  The add-on's panel then shows a HUD finder. With the HUD on screen, press Scan, close the overlay and step through the list:

  • []Page Down / Page Up make the next or previous shader blink.

    []Home adds the blinking shader to the list, or takes it off.

    []End stops the blinking.

    []Delete makes the whole list blink, so any part of the HUD that stays steady is still missing.

    The list is saved to hudmask.cfg as you go. HudMaskView.fx, included, paints the mask red so you can check it covers the HUD and nothing else.

    Source

    github.com/danyalziakhan/hudmask, MIT licence.

    Acknowledgements

    ReshadeEffectShaderToggler was the inspiration for finding a game's shaders by their hashes. I chose to build my own because I wanted something very simple, that does one job and is not prone to bugs or crashes.