The Light in the Darkness ultrawide solution & latest WIP

Over the past weeks, I have looked into a number of games. I'll briefly go through the main few.

My research into Monkey Island 2: Special Edition wasn't too fruitful, as I found the original resolution in the code but could not get the game to fill the screen without stretching. It appears that the game has just a few scenes that are scrollable, meaning there is no content to show at the others, but I still wish I could have done more without investing too much time.

I then looked into Celeste but had similar results. After finding the original resolution in the code, as well as a number of other functions, I can get the game to either stretch or be vert-. I also found an unreliable way to have it expose more of the world horizontally but another issue that showed up is that the game loaded its assets on the move, so by increasing the view I could see its world parts appear on the far edge in real time. This means that on top of reliably expanding the view, I would also need to find the code responsible for this loading behavior to make it playable. As with the previous game, I decided to put it aside for later in order to stay sane (if one can even use that word to characterize what I do).

Moving on, I spent most of the hours of the 10-hour trial of Wild Hearts to fix it being locked to 21:9. Although I ended up with a good solution that replaced the in-game resolutions with that of the player, the matter of cutscenes being pillarboxed to 16:9 still needed to be addressed. I had some success in removing the black bars but not through anything reliable that could be converted into a fix. That and not having much time left of the trial to maintain the resolution fix in the event of game updates meant giving up for now. Thankfully, Lyall independently fixed the resolution in a very similar way and released the Cheat Table, so the situation isn't that bad for those who can't wait.

Finally, on the title of this post, I had learned of a new free game and downloaded it to look into its ultrawide support. It turned out to be on Unreal Engine 5, which I haven't dealt with before except for the Superman / Matrix demo where the well-known YFOV line worked without issues.

The bad news was that, as I say, none of my old patterns could be used in any way, but the good news is that on the code level, the engine isn't drastically different from UE4, so after some digging through the code, I managed to remove the black bars and fix the FOV.

You may not even be interested in the game but I think this step is very important, as we are soon to be seeing more and more games on Unreal Engine 5. Layers of Fear is nearing its release, to be followed by others like STALKER 2 and Redfall set to come out this year. Using the current versions of the UE4 console unlocker is not going to work, so it appears that games on this engine may require more attention of creators like myself. I can't say I will have access to each of those games but I will be looking at a few for sure. As a side note, I might be modding a few anticipated UE4 games this year as well!