Batman Arkham Knight ultrawide solution

It's my birthday but as on past occasions, why not celebrate by creating a fix? The latest outstanding request was from the Remedy dev behind the unofficial patch for Control, and he was even looking to offer a bounty for it.

The request was for Batman Arkham Knight, and as it turned out, the game was much like the Saints Row games that not only reduce the field of view at the cutscenes but also simultaneously pillarbox, although only some of them in this case.

The game is on Unreal Engine 3, which I have barely touched over the years, so it was no wonder when none of my prior findings or patterns were of use. Even the ones for Gears and Sherlock Holmes Crimes & Punishments, both on UE3, were of zero help.

I tried all kinds of approaches for removing the black bars, be it via the aspect ratio, resolution values, or general searches. The black bars turned out to be a texture-like element, just like in Redfall. As such, the easier way was to just remove it as a shader without any further attempts at hunting down the function in the game code.

Having got the black bars out of the way, I had to locate the field of view function and make sure that increasing the FOV wouldn't also increase it at the gameplay. Naturally, this was the harder task but after hours of searching and tracing, I managed to find a value that is specific to the cutscenes.

An additional obstacle was the implementation, as the initial area did not have enough space for my injection, but it wasn't the first time, so I found another valid place and could now move onto writing a DLL.

After that step, the solution is ready, and once again we are left to guess why nobody had done it in the 8 years since this highly anticipated game came out. Lucky for me though, it's the only main Arkham series game I haven't played, so the solution should also get me to finally do it sometime soon!

Update:

After a report of the shader-based fix breaking quest and map markers, I found no way to address the issue, so I had to return to looking for any related values in the game code. After a day of searching and few distractions, I finally managed to find what looked like the source of the pillarboxing, so the latest version removes them directly via the game code and some of my most complex calculations. This also means that the fix is now compatible with other DLL injections that are applied via d3d11, as the DLL is no longer used by my fix.