Tunic ultrawide and wider solution
Added 2022-03-17 10:05:04 +0000 UTCThe most anticipated Steam game of yesterday was Tunic and it also made a surprise appearance on Game Pass. I got on it as soon as I could, then spent the next 6 or 7 hours on reading through and experimenting with its assembly code without a pause except to send a few messages on the WSGF Discord.
During the installation on Game Pass, it indicated that the game would not allow to access the files, so that was the assumption I had. Eventually I saw its files in my games folder, but they were not modifiable. I thought that memory hacking it was the only way.
After some of those hours spent on forcing the user's desktop resolution and removing the black bars, I found that the game did not read its render texture code except on launch and when changing the resolution, but that part of the solution was crucial, as it ensured there was no stretching. Asking the user to change the resolution was not an option, because the way I forced the game to read the user's resolution meant that it was never changing from that. I tried to address it in multiple ways, including passing the already loaded aspect ratio from one real-time function to another of a completely different part of the code (which is the last thing you should ever do!). It worked in theory but in practice caused the render resolution to be visibly low.
It was only later that I realized that I could try modifying the files as an administrator, as suggested by Lyall on the WSGF Discord. That made it easy to make my already thorough research into a practical solution. Compared to the manual solution of replacing the usual 16:9 bytes in GameAssembly, as shared by someone on Steam, my patcher will unlock all ultrawide resolutions and allow to switch between them on the fly, and I also had made sure to fix the UI scaling for vertical and size parity with 16:9.
Looks like this is my third Unity fix in a row. Thankfully, ANNO: Mutationem reviewed by me before its release for the /r/ultrawidemasterrace curator has nearly flawless native ultrawide support, so I'm hoping I'll get to take a (short?) break now! Enjoy the games!
