Rose
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Ghostbusters Remastered ultrawide solution + Flawless Widescreen
🕑 Added 2021-08-12 12:59:01 +0000 UTCA long read ahead! Feel free to just download Flawless Widescreen containing my script.
Last year, I was looking into Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered to see if I could fix the extreme cropping of the UI causing all crucial elements (like the current goal or interaction prompts) to be out of view even at 21:9.
I had some progress but the need to constantly unpause the game after switching focus to its code was very annoying and I also ran into some crosshair alignment issues. The final nail must have been the vert- scaling of the rendered cutscenes. It felt like too much to fix.
Fast forward to just days ago, and czarman (who is a long-time WSGF user) began to post his hex editing solutions for a couple of older games, including this one. It got me interested and I even discovered the game on my hard drive so forgotten that even the launcher didn't know about its existence.
I examined the code related to the bytes posted by czarman and also looked at the game behavior. It was undoubtedly better than the vanilla experience, making the game playable at 21:9, but there were some flaws.
The bytes shared by czarman are effectively static values modified specifically for 21:9 only. There was also no solution specific to the cutscenes - instead, czarman had to modify the overall FOV, causing a significant increase to the gameplay FOV and no exact match at the cutscenes.
As with all of my ultrawide fixes, I wanted the experience to be as close as possible to the original, meaning perfect vertical FOV parity with 16:9 across the board.
After many hours on it, I was getting somewhere with the cutscenes, initially managing to separate the FOV from the gameplay but without being able to fine-tune it for parity (the game used the aspect ratio of 1.33 as its guide and I needed it to be 1.78).
Then the constant need to unpause the game began to feel unbearable again and so I asked czarman if he had found a way to bypass it. He said he also had to suffer through the pauses, but HaYDeN offered a way out! The code and its compiled version that were shared allowed to make any game think that it's in focus, so now I was able to preview my code modifications immediately.
More hours of research followed, keeping me up and even making me take a photo of the code to keep going over while in bed. I guess it got to me and so I only had 5 hours of sleep last night. Eight hours on it later, and I had a working Flawless Widescreen script ready - it included the code to perfectly adjust the vertical FOV of the cutscenes and calculate the right values for the UI adjustment without being tied to just one resolution. As a bonus compared to czarman's solution, mine has no effect on the native menu screens, and I'm not yet sure if that is a benefit because even natively they get rather messy at 32:9 and wider.
These releases likely mark the first time there is a fix for the Ghostbusters game since 2009, as the original game was affected by the same issues.
I also talked to HaYDeN about making the script an official part of Flawless Widescreen (which would be my first), though I am still not too excited about the possible delays that it may cause if I ever need to update the script. Moreover, making this for Flawless Widescreen was more of an exception, as it takes a lot of time to do the extra coding and the styling when I'm already almost burned out and want to release the solution immediately. Nevertheless, we'll see how it goes and who knows what the future holds!
For now, and at least until czarman tests this in the Steam version, I'm attaching the script to this post along with the older WSGF scripts. I'll update this post if the script gets copied to the Flawless Widescreen repo.
Update: It's live, attachment removed!
Comments
Rose
Thanks! This community certainly helps me stay afloat! I also keep myself in check now and move on if really necessary, so the remark was on the idea of what needs to be done to decrease the load. The code reading and then the thinking and the experimenting with the ways to modify it can be very exhausting, so if I have a breakthrough and have it tested, I try to package the solution as effortlessly as possible and get it over with. There are some benefits to Flawless Widescreen but I guess there is a reason that there are so few third-party scripts in it - unless you are HaYDeN, who is its creator, you still have to think and look a few things up when writing a script for it. Good enough for every now and then but seemingly ineffective at my rate of fixing!
Eleriam
Please don't burn out! Please please please! You're doing such amazing and much needed work, the ultrawide community definitely needs you Rose, and if you burn out, we'll be so much poorer, not to mention that you'll feel bad if you get to that point.
