Rose
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R-Type Final 2 ultrawide fix
🕑 Added 2021-05-12 01:15:58 +0000 UTCFollowing a WSGF request and GOG providing review access, I got on this yet another Unreal Engine 4 game.
Sadly, it being on a familiar engine hardly helped, as most of the patterns known to me were missing. Still, I understood the engine well enough to have a starting point and figure out the rest by the usual way of disassembling over the course of the following hours.
Like The Medium fix, this one pulls the user's resolution from one place and then injects it in another, also correcting the FOV for each scene in real time after removing the black bars.
I'm bad at the game and I was too tired to play it after working on the solution, but I did go through all the gameplay parts I could reach, including the in-engine cutscenes, various views of the museum, customization (some UI issues here, easy to go back to 16:9 with the trainer button press), and the main gameplay.
I also searched through the Steam discussions for any mentions of ultrawide, and here is the content of a post I found:
"How would you implement ultrawide in a schmup developed for 16:9?? You can't just add extra screen space without it totally mangling the difficulty curve, which is largely based on reacting to approaching threats."
Well, what do you do in response to something like this? Test the game at 96:9, of course! It fills the whole screen even at that resolution, though completely cropping off some of the intro dialogue options (they are skippable, so must be unimportant?).
Comments
Rose
I made sure to warn people of the issues on the description page :) At 96:9, you can see the boxes of the two unreachable dialogue options in the intro (it's called a "demo" in the game, with a checkbox to skip it before going into the gameplay), so the issue also gives itself away! Then a simple press of F9 would make the pillarboxing reappear, allowing to select any option and then press F9 again. I can't imagine anyone really playing at 96:9, so this is more like a stress test. In terms of the game itself, I too remember playing similar games either in the late 90s or early 2000s but never so much that I'd be great at them, so we're totally in the same boat!
Eleriam
"I'm bad at the game" I played the original R-Type on the ZX Spectrum, and I was bad at the game then already. And I didn't have the age handicap either! :D I'm not surprised that the game is still hard. If making it ultrawide compatible makes it a little bit easier, it's fine by me. Having text cut off might ruin the immersion though, and make me wonder if I didn't do something right, and stop the game to investigate. Maybe a little text tooltip warning that in-game text gets cropped at 96:9?
