Rose

Dungeon of the Endless ultrawide and wider solution

I received a request for a fix for this game made by the creators of Endless Space, more recently known for Humankind and the upcoming Endless Dungeon. The person told me they had tried hex editing the game files to no avail, so although I did not own the game, I purchased it just for the task.

The game properly scales its UI for ultrawide and even expands the view at the menu, but then stretches from 16:9 at the gameplay and warns of this very issue when an unsupported resolution is s...

The hard work never stops

The long-awaited Swansong update had just dropped and I found that the devs had attempted to fix some of the native ultrawide issues affecting the game. Before the update, the gameplay FOV scaling was purely horizontal, so the 21:9 and wider users never got to see more than a 16:9 user. The cutscenes were just pillarboxed and everyone got to see as much as the next person at those.

The update introduced new code featuring improper calculations. The new native experience is slightly ver...

My fix may crash your PC! (apparently)

Hopefully this brightens your day!

Halo 3 letterbox remover

A relatively straightforward solution made in response to a specific request from a 16:9 user. I didn't feel like making my existing ultrawide solution more code-complex by introducing a check for the user's resolution, so I made it in...

The Quarry ultrawide and wider solution

In the weeks that followed the release of Swansong, I really wanted to fix something new but there were no new games in need of fixing.

The release of The Quarry was surely making waves though, as the dedicated ultrawide thread on Steam amassed 100 posts in just one day, while WSGF members were also asking for a fix via our subreddit and Discord. Even Otis_Inf must have struggled, as he came out of the woodwork (only to share the inapplicable bytes from killer-m's solution for Man of M...

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong ultrawide and wider solution

As you may know from reading the previous posts, leaving PCGW meant that I could no longer request games from its press account, and my /r/ultrawidemasterrace contact mostly moved on to represent a manufacturer of PC peripherals, which effectively put a stop to my ability to obtain review copies. No more getting people to wonder how I could put out the Kena patcher the minute of its official release!

Representing WSGF, there was not much I could offer, given its narrower reach, while a...

Something cooking up again

It's planned for this week :)

Mirror 2 Home update

The game remains as weird as it was, and despite the records of thousands concurrent players, the solution has not even reached 100 downloads. Still, I want to keep you up to date and so I'm sharing a couple of new screenshots made in the new mode using the updated version of the mod, which was rather easy to make, as the relevant code was unchanged.

Maybe I should have a presence on a po...

Trek to Yomi super ultrawide and wider solution

Here comes another Unreal Engine 4 game in need of fixing! Thankfully, it was not in the usual way, as the game is built around a 21:9 aspect ratio, letterboxing to that at 16:9 and pillarboxing at 32:9. On WSGF, we'd call that 'Anamorphic' but following the raised concerns about the unrelated connotations of the term, we're likely going to change it to 'Static AR' in the nearest future.

Regardless of the term, the game still needed to be fixed for 32:9 and wider, which was mitigated b...

Vampire: The Masquerade - Heartless Lullaby ultrawide solution

I put my prior findings to use for this free game released just a day ago. According to its description, it's a prologue that is less than 2 hours long, so I'm making the patcher available here and hoping to create a public fix for the full game once it is out, if ever.

Natively, the game is literally unplayable (TM) in ultrawide and wider, as the main menu is completely out of view. I'm aiming to play through the game over one of the next few days, which is going to be a good opportun...

Easy ultrawide fix for City Sample demo of UE5

The good old YFOV config tweak from Unreal Engine 4 works with the City Sample demo of Unreal Engine 5 used for The Matrix Awakens experience and released by Epic earlier this month. The screenshots feature the unofficial version where you get to fly around as Superman, which can be downloaded via the lin...

Major updates to Halo the MCC cutscenes fix

The latest update to the game must have been significant, as I got two comments for the PCGW page reporting that most of my fixes for the collection were no longer working.

They were right and much of the relevant game code had been changed. For the prior solutions, forcing the game to ignore its checks was sufficient for removing the pi...

Manhunt 2 widescreen and wider solution

Phew. Another long read ahead, but you'll understand why if you get to the end! If not, here is a link to the solution (mirrored here)!

About a week ago, someone on the...

That controversial game which you can't buy

Just something I've been trying to fix. Hopefully I won't run into a particularly troubling issue to have to abandon the efforts. Right now the goal is getting close to perfection in matching the vertical FOV to that of the original aspect ratio, as well as looking at the scenes outside the main gameplay to ensure there is nothing too problematic.

Death Stranding Director's Cut ultrawide and FOV tweaks

Today I woke up to reports of my original solution for Death Stranding not working for the Director's Cut edition of the game. I did not even know the upgrade cost at the time, so my first reaction was bordering on disappointment, as a shared exe tends to be of limited use if you can't run the process and look at all the values and functions as they perform in real time.

On top of the reports on Discord, I had two messages posted to my PCGW status feed, which is a rare occurrence! One ...

Far Cry 5 FOV improvements

After a personal request, I began to look into Far Cry 5 in order to increase its FOV limit of 120, which the person found to be too limiting even at 16:9. Although there were many similarities between the Far Cry games, and I knew a thing or two from working on Far Cry 6 and Primal, the knowledge was hardly helpful in getting to the right code.

As it happens, it took many hours of non-stop code reading just to be able to find the functions responsible for the limitations, and again ma...

Tunic ultrawide and wider solution

The most anticipated Steam game of yesterday was Tunic and it also made a surprise appearance on Game Pass. I got on it as soon as I could, then spent the next 6 or 7 hours on reading through and experimenting with its assembly code without a pause except to send a few messages on the WSGF Discord.

During the installation on Game Pass, it indicated that the game would not allow to access the files, so that was the assumption I had. Eventually I saw its files in my games folder, but the...

The Sexy Brutale ultrawide and wider solution, lessons learned

The Sexy Brutale was released in 2017 and even got covered in a Detailed Report on WSGF.

Although the game defaulted to the user's desktop resolution, it did not allow to select anything wider than 16:9. Ignoring the lack of ultrawide resolutions and attempting to proceed resulted in the common issues seen in Unity: the UI got bigger and was partially cropped at 21:9, while the buttons allowing to start the game were fully out of view at 32:9 and wider, making the game unplayable at th...

Young Souls ultrawide and wider solution

As you know, whenever a new game is released on Game Pass, I try to check whether it supports ultrawide. In the case of Young Souls, I found a Steam post inquiring about its ultrawide support in October last year. The developer responded but the next comment indicated that the game still had no ultrawide support. A call to action!

It is a Unity game and the new Microsoft Store format allowed me to treat it like any other platform, as opposed to relying purely on memory hacking. Neverth...

Combat Wings: Battle of Britain widescreen and wider solution

In the absence of notable releases or opportunity to get the most expensive and recent games, I responded to a request to fix this game from 2006 which lacked solutions even for 16:9. HaYDeN made fun of it, but I always try to cover all kinds of games and often act on requests irrespective of my personal interest or whether the game has 800K concurrent players on Steam, if you know what I mean!

That brings us to Combat Wings: Battle of Britain, which did not store its aspect ratio as a...

Microsoft Store / Game Pass updated to be more permissive

An update that has been available to Insiders of the Xbox app for a while (accessible very easily but being an extra step to take) appears to be live to everybody now. I know it is for me!

The reason it is relevant to ultrawide and wider users is that it's going to get easier to fix the games now but it also means that some games previously without fixes on Game Pass can now be fixed by the existing solutions. The list includes my 2022-02-26 02:59:36 +0000 UTC View Post

Infernax ultrawide and wider (partial) solution

Looking for a texture in the memory of a program is like looking for a needle in the hay. In 3D games, there will be thousands upon thousands, and their actual size would not be known just from having a look. It may not even be stored in the code. A 2D game limits the scope but still contains many.

When you have file access, you could try using a tool that identifies textures as shaders, such as Special K. What do you do on Game Pass though? A developer I talked to today would just avoi...

Last Kids on Earth and the Staff of Doom solution available on demand

Here is another game for which I have found a solution but the code would need to be better tested, prepared and then packaged. Since its release 9 months ago, its all-time peak is 6 players on Steam, so I don't think it's worth putting out there and then maintaining it through updates if there is no interest at all. So just let me know if you really like the game and want to play it via Microsoft Store, and I'll try to make it happen!

Thank you

I thanked each of you when you joined, and in my mind I'm thankful every day, but I would like to thank you openly again.

There is no knowing whether any of my fixes results in a donation, and the 1000 downloads of the one for Sifu in about 2 days without a single donation is a sobering reminder of the unpredictability in what I do.

However, your support alleviates what would have been a net loss from purchasing a game, and in many cases results in a benefit. I really apprecia...

Sifu fix: the screenshots (attempt #2)

Sorry for another post on this! After a few hours of sleep I checked my phone and noticed a bug report, which got me to get up and find a number of issues with the solution and publish the updated version. Sadly, it reset the download count of about 45 too, so I may want to think of going back to the one repo per solution approach or of other ways around it. I'm digressing though -...

Sifu ultrawide fix and FOV changer + WSGF news

I'm super exhausted after working on this fix mostly due to staying up late, but I want you to be among the first to know of its existence. The gist of it is that it's an Unreal Engine 4 game on a newer build, though with no clear signs of exhibiting the new scaling behavior that would allow to make it easier to switch to proper hor+ scaling. None of the old patterns were applicable but the general idea of the fix remained the same, based on FOV conversion resulting in the usual support for a...

Dreamscaper better ultrawide and wider

As I might have told you, the thing I probably dislike the most about game developers in relation to ultrawide is when they introduce their own flawed implementations of ultrawide support and break my existing perfect solutions for all aspect ratios. It happened to The Medium and The Ascent, among others.

Dreamscaper is a game that I hadn't had access to until its arrival on Game Pass but it reminded me of those games because it had a form of ultrawide support that got in the way of the...

Milky Way Prince - The Vampire Star WIP

I have a work-in-progress fix for this low-key game, but as you can see in the last screenshot, changing the UI behavior so that no buttons are out of view causes the textures of some scenes to zoom out so much that it may affect the immersion. Let me know if you'd be willing to play through the game soon and if so, I'll package the fix and share it. If not, I'll play through the game at one point and test it myself! Then if all goes well and I find it tolerable, I'll release the solution to ...

Not For Broadcast resolutions unlocker

Whenever shovelware is sent to the /r/ultrawidemasterrace curator on Steam, you know the creators' goal is to use the established platform to promote their game for free, but when we receive an already popular game from a reputable publisher with 16:9 heavily enforced, what is the logic? Empathy being in the human nature, I want to believe that their intentions are good and they just want honest feedback on the state of ultrawide support, but it's really tough to believe when all the facts ar...

Expeditions: Rome ultrawide and wider solution

After a WSGF request, I looked into this newly released Unreal Engine 4 game featuring artwork in the place of black bars, just like Hades.

My first course of action was to remove them the usual way of correcting the aspect ratio, but it turned out that the game already had vertical parity across wider resolutions and no constraining to an aspect ratio, so the bars were essentially textures laid over the game world. At 21:9, that covered some parts but not the gameplay, whereas at 32:9 ...