Rose

Beacon Pines ultrawide and wider solution + a bit on Slime Rancher 2

Added 2022-09-23 13:08:57 +0000 UTC

This game was released yesterday, on the same day as Slime Rancher 2. Personally, I was more interested in Beacon Pines but went to download and look into Slime Rancher 2 first, seeing how it had many times more players, and threads asking about its ultrawide support. So let's start with that one!

I found that Slime Rancher 2 was hor+ and allowed to select all the resolutions I tried. The UI was not scaling correctly, so I invested hours into fixing that via assembly, but then I realized that the incorrect scaling of some of its parts was seemingly not detrimental to the experience. In my relatively brief testing, I found no elements that were out of view even at 32:9. I also saw a thread declaring that the game is "fine" at 21:9.

Given the lack of complaints despite the huge player base, I chose not to package and release anything at this time, as I don't expect the solution to be in demand, but having it up would mean having another game I'd need to keep installed to maintain my solution if necessary.

Moving onto Beacon Pines, this was also a Unity game not unlike many of the others. All the generic behaviors were in place, plus a bit of the devs' own code to tackle. Unlike Slime Rancher 2, this was not as time-consuming.

It is worth noting (if not obvious from the screenshots!) that this is a game much like Return to Monkey Island or even "worse" in that it doesn't seem to have any locations that scroll, so it relies heavily on its static backgrounds, some of which are in about 16:9 and the others are closer to 21:9. It's much like a visual novel in that, but I thought that even exposing those yellowish or off-white background colors that fill the space where the background assets end is better than it always being black and limited to 16:9.

As such, you don't really win much or get to see any more useful content with the help of the solution, yet it's likely to improve the overall feel of the game. Oh, and it's also pretty cool to see it expose more of the backpack content at once without having to switch left and right as you would at 16:9!