Expeditions: Rome ultrawide and wider solution
Added 2022-01-27 08:11:01 +0000 UTCAfter 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 and wider, even the gameplay was limited to 21:9.
Tracking down a texture in assembly code is quite tough, so after having found some interesting but not helpful commands used in this game, as well as a way to remove the UI but not the bars alone, I had to resort to dealing with the shaders.
3Dmigoto allowed me to create a pretty simple shader override and I found no issues in my testing leading up to the first combat encounter and through some of it.
It's rather easy to get lost in managing many GitHub repos, so I will be trying to have all of my future fixes on one page from now on.
Edit: After digging a bit further, I was also able to manipulate the UI to remove the bars entirely and span the UI but that constrained the mouse to 16:9, so it would take much longer to get it right via the code.
