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Deliver Us Mars ultrawide and wider solution
🕑 Added 2023-12-20 17:24:24 +0000 UTCShortly after I released my solution for Deliver Us the Moon, AlRayes of Ultrawide Benchmarks told me that the game developer would like to talk to me about making it official.
I messaged the dev as suggested and told them that I had no experience with the Unreal editor and that my knowledge is only of the low-level code. I also couldn't give them a function in C to incorporate into the game code, as my fixes were in assembly. However, I gave them the contact info of another Unreal developer who had tackled the issue of FOV reduction in their own game on Steam and was willing to advise on the issue.
The Deliver developer told me they'd implement ultrawide after shipping another feature, which was nice to know. The game has never received any form of ultrawide support though.
Its sequel, Deliver Us Mars, also lacked ultrawide support when it launched, though it did get some improvements in an update. Thanks to the Epic giveaway, I was able to finally look into the game to see how it fares.
As soon as the main menu loaded, one issue was obvious: it was purely vert-. The intro cutscene was the same way. The first sign of ultrawide support was the gameplay view. Upon a closer look, I noticed the issue of the scaling being imperfect, with the vertical field of view not fully matching that of 16:9. Here we go again!
Of course, the issues weren't novel, and I had seen similar things in Jusant, Remnant 2, VtM Swansong, Werewolf Earthblood, and possibly more titles. I knew I was dealing with two separate scaling behaviors and had to somehow turn them into one. As before, compensating for the FOV reduction at the cutscenes would overcompensate at the gameplay if done blindly.
Once more, the main quest was to find the devs' custom function that aims to correct the gameplay FOV, and to get rid of it to implement a global solution. At first, I came across the corrected value rather than the function itself. Getting rid of that and letting the game use the unconverted value seemed fine, but then I noticed that the game has FOV sliders, which were broken by the approach.
Hunting down the actual custom function was a problem, as there is no generic way to get to the code (or pre-made addon) unique to this game. In time, I got there, which opened the door to forcing the game to have hor+ scaling across all scenes.
Getting the engine to vertically match 16:9 at every scene was tricky, but I already had come up with a means of getting there in Robocop, so it was a matter of adapting those findings to this game and then ensuring my fix works in the real world.
As you will see in the captioned screenshots, the FOV is now brought to parity no matter where you look. The FOV slider works as well. Now is a good time to play the game!
