Saints Row IV ultrawide cutscenes solution

If you had to guess what is the worst kind of scaling behavior for ultrawide, what would it be? Reducing the FOV (vert-)? Pillarboxing or windowboxing? All wrong in relation to this game that felt like deja vu, as I had already dealt with a very similar behavior in Saints Row 3.

As in its predecessor, the game cutscenes are a mess to put it mildly. Natively at 21:9, the game windowboxes the cutscenes and simultaneously reduces their field of view compared to 16:9. At 32:9 and wider, or with the right config setting for 21:9, it pillarboxes to 16:9 and reduces the FOV. I said this in relation to Saints Row 3, but pick one, please!

Fixing Saints Row 4 required a layered approach. I found no ties between the aspect ratio code and the black bars, so I tried to target them as a texture. That went well but I would still have to correct the FOV. After a while of trying to locate the relevant code, I did it but had to inject new code, so it would have to be a trainer. Now how would I combine that with a shader hack requiring a separate tool, plus the config edit? It works but it's a burden for the user.

So I had to find the shader inside the game code to target via assembly. It took a while, because as with UI and similar things, it's a needle in a haystack type task requiring a lot of searching, as it's not necessarily tied to any proper game code. For example, if I make a program load a semi-transparent image file, how is it to know where the transparency begins? You really have to guess with some of those things and go by what might be the total size, if you can even locate it in the code.

Eventually, I got to the right code. First for the menu by accident, then the cutscenes. I chose not to touch the menu, as I'm afraid it might affect the scaling of something else, but the cutscene black bars are going away and the two parts of the fix can now be one.

Ideally - and I did a bit of digging into this - I could make the config change unnecessary and just change the related code, but I think that making a simple change to a config file in the game folder is not too much to ask from the user. It's always a compromise so that I can keep making more solutions, not sacrifice everything to achieve absolute perfection in a single game.

Regardless, we have another "that's a first" solution for a game released nearly 10 years ago!