The Quarry ultrawide and wider solution
Added 2022-06-11 10:56:00 +0000 UTCIn the weeks that followed the release of Swansong, I really wanted to fix something new but there were no new games in need of fixing.
The release of The Quarry was surely making waves though, as the dedicated ultrawide thread on Steam amassed 100 posts in just one day, while WSGF members were also asking for a fix via our subreddit and Discord. Even Otis_Inf must have struggled, as he came out of the woodwork (only to share the inapplicable bytes from killer-m's solution for Man of Medan :D). Things were tough, right?
I was told that the game had a demo, so I started from there. Lately I've been telling you about a number of ultrawide fixes for UE4 that were pretty straightforward. Not this one! For the main goal of removing the black bars, all of my past findings had to be discarded and I had to resort to the black box approach of pure reverse engineering. I even checked to see if the bars were textures, as none of my attempts had any effect (something reflected in the attempts of others as well), but that turned out not to be the case.
I spent all day on further attempts and finally had a breakthrough when one of the bars went off the screen. The promising revelation allowed me to dig deeper and inject some code, though some letterboxing remained. That is when I was able to get back to my prior research into the engine and get rid of those as well. Was that it? Of course not! The FOV scaling was vert-, so I had to correct that as well.
All the manipulations also showed that the game was certainly built around the letterboxing, as some of its UI elements and the subtitles were making use of that space or relying on it as an offset. That caused some issues where the field of view was correctly adjusted for the aspect ratio of the display but a menu bar covered some of the view, creating the impression of field of view reduction. I think the issues are minor and the new experience is incomparably better than the windowboxing, but I noted the issues regardless.
Sometimes I ask for a challenge and sometimes I certainly get it! Now it's time for the community to enjoy the game!
Post update: The release must have been a success, because there is a competing solution that just copies my findings and makes the same changes at the same locations of the code. Impossible to have been a coincidence. I'm not sure whether to publicly call them out, as I don't want to give them more attention or force them to try to get better at hiding their tracks. The lack of mention of it being derivative says enough about the person's moral code.
Post update 2:
Version 1.1 of my fix addressed the issue of the screen turning white at some scenes and it reportedly addressed the crashes related to the Path Chosen screen.
Version 1.2 released today (June 13 UTC) also fixes the screen effects seen at the Path Chosen screen and when using the 80s filter. No more weird squares of different colors covering the screen. Oh, and I also left a note for the thief in the code!
Post update 3:
There is now another tool, which is a copy of the copy with no original research in sight!
