Rose

The Evil Within solution for Game Pass

Added 2021-03-22 05:02:43 +0000 UTC

A WSGF user requested that I look into the new Game Pass version of The Evil Within, which comes with a first person mode and an option to change the FOV in that mode, along with some other improvements.

I downloaded the rather sizeable 50 GB game and found that Flawless Widescreen did not work for it, which must have been the cause of the request. Not only did the tool fail to find one of its injection points, which I easily removed for the sake of testing, but it also simply couldn't read or write to the game code.

I ended up using a family shared account (which I typically avoid at all costs, as it does not allow me to maintain solutions) to download the Steam version and look into it, which was another 50 GB download. Flawless Widescreen worked for it without issues, but trying it on the Game Pass version of Man of Medan proved that the tool could not be used on any protected Microsoft Store apps.

Thus I had to move away from the idea of simply improving the script, and I used some of HaYDeN's findings at its core to understand the fixes, though some of them were inapplicable to the code of the Microsoft Store version. Still, they helped me locate the values the game used for its FOV, and black bars calculations. Even having that, it took a full day of non-stop research, trial and testing to produce a solution.

In the end, my trainer relies on one injection point of Flawless Widescreen - though replacing the common 16:9 aspect ratio bytes could probably work as well - and two of the trainer scripts rely on my own findings.

Compared to Flawless Widescreen, my solution injects less into the game memory, but it's also unable to store the set FOV values for future use. Not that Game Pass users have any choice!