South of the Circle ultrawide and wider & a tale of unlocking hidden features

Spending so much time on reverse engineering has taught me to always try to dig deeper and, as you may remember from a few of the prior posts, to often approach an application as a black box that must be dealt with on the low level. Sometimes I would jump straight into the code before looking for the more obvious, like the known bytes for the 16/9 float.

Today's story is a bit different but also similar. I did try the basics, to no avail, then I spent hours on reading through the assembly code and experimenting with applying my findings for similar games. My discoveries documented in the long Lost in Play post were very helpful and could be adapted to this new game, which was also 32-bit and also on Unity. Nevertheless, it was also tricky in parts because the game had no resolution or window mode options, so how would I force it to read from the code I had modified? I figured out the path, but then my quest of making solutions as reliable as possible got me to look closer to the surface, at the high-level code.

It would have been an understatement to say that I was surprised when I discovered the way the problem could have been solved. As I had looked for anything related to resolutions, I saw a lot of code related to a resolution selector. What was it for? Then came the revelation. There was a function that was used specifically to remove three settings from the options menu. They were for the resolution selection, fullscreen toggle, and the director commentary. Needless to say, I got rid of that code and, lo and behold, the options were now in the game, neatly placed below the rest and perfectly native (see the screenshots!).

You know it's common for me to just expand the list of resolutions available for selection but it's not every day that I get to restore pre-written functions disabled by developers (and they do want them disabled so much that they offer weird workarounds for what's already in). It's like those mods that unlock console DLC with a config line! To be absolutely fair though, the devs must have had their reason for hiding those functions, and perhaps there were imperfections that they wanted to address before unlocking the options, if ever. Well, I'm not bound by the need to thoroughly QA and so I can just expose those features for you! A mod is a mod.

It's worth noting that my fix did not stop at unlocking the dev functions, as I also had to make all wide resolutions available for selection, and correct the UI, so the earlier experiments weren't for nothing.

Unfortunately, as I played through the game, I discovered that the UI fix also introduces a bug, which may be seen as a softlock if unprepared. If prepared, however, bypassing it is rather simple. I documented the steps on the public download page.

For you I'm attaching a special version of my patcher that will unlock each of the options I mentioned, whereas for the public release I'm not unlocking the director's commentary, as it's beyond the scope of my solutions, and I don't even know whether the commentary is in the game yet! If not, it's still cool to have the fully unlocked, ULTIMATE version of South of the Circle, right?

Until next time!