Remnant 2 ultrawide cutscenes solution
Added 2023-08-01 19:37:21 +0000 UTCRemember my post saying that we're about to see more games on UE5 and in need of my fixing? Remnant 2 must be the biggest to date. Although it doesn't neglect ultrawide users at all, there is at least one imperfection that the community wanted fixed. It's the pillarboxing of the cutscenes.
Upon closer inspection and from removing the black bars, I found that this also reduced the FOV - something we've come to expect from an Unreal Engine game set to the engine default of vert- aka XFOV. The common approach to addressing that is either re-calculating based on the aspect ratio using the trusted formula, or using the native engine functionality similar to adding YFOV to the config.
In Remnant 2, neither of the approaches would solve the problem, as the developers appear to be in the crowd that think they know better than to use the engine defaults. Going by the code, they introduced their own calculations, which do not even achieve perfect vertical parity with 16:9, though they get it quite close (see the screenshots).
I dealt with similar things in Dreamscape, Destroy All Humans 2, Werewolf, Swansong, and a few other titles, so I knew that the solution was to get rid of the devs' home brew and replace it with the perfect calculations of the engine itself or the widely accepted formula.
The engine defaults are more or less familiar, and I had made preparations for finding them via another upcoming game, but finding unique code is always a problem, which was my primary focus after having located the rest. Once discovered, achieving perfection was straightforward.
