A rocky yet fruitful year! (Patreon)

2020 started quite well. In January, I managed to produce an ultrawide solution for Dragon Quest Builders 2 despite its in-house engine and lack of reliance on a specific aspect ratio. The more complicated solutions are always the biggest wins to me!

That was followed by my Game Pass solutions for GRIS and A Plague Tale - the games had workarounds requiring modifications to their files but I had to start from scratch due to the closed nature of Microsoft apps. The resulting trainer for A Plague Tale has been successful, with thousands of downloads to date.

Then I began to work on removing the rampant windowboxing in Zombie Army 4, which turned into an unprecedented struggle taking 70 to 100 hours of non-stop reverse engineering. To make matters worse, as you may know, I lost my hard drive containing all my past findings and at least 17 years of personal archives. As covered in the dedicated post, the community, including the founder of WSGF, was super helpful in funding a hard drive and an SSD to help me start anew. Being close to burning out when hacking Zombie Army 4, I told myself to know when to stop and move onto another game, even if there is no solution. Let's find out whether it was good self-advice!

In the following months, I've created solutions for Rebel Cops, Dying Light, the Game Pass version of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Superliminal, Operencia, Disaster Report 4, DuckTales Remastered, and Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments.

Another highlight was my research into GTA V following a request. There had been a few previous reports of the existing Flawless Widescreen script not working for months, and I even referred to it at one point to demonstrate that open source is not the answer in itself - otherwise somebody of the huge GTA community would have just examined the code and done it, right? As it goes, it required an almost black box approach to find all the pieces of code responsible for the FOV of each view. I decided to combine the all-new findings with HaYDeN's script already containing the relevant control elements, making it a script like the old. That has been downloaded by thousands too!

Some large titles followed, including Mafia 2 DE, Halo 2, and Rise of the Tomb Raider, with Observation and Minecraft Dungeons in between - all on the list of games modded for wider screen support by me this year.

It didn't stop, as I released fixes for Desperados 3 (now native!), Zombie Army Trilogy, Spongebob Rehydrated, Blasphemous (an unorthodox solution made of two parts), and Halo 3.

Then Death Stranding came out and suggested to keep on keeping on, and so we did! The more or less expected aspect ratio change approach I had in mind was also simultaneously figured out by others, so I had to add to it by removing the vertical FOV reduction at the cutscenes, then by creating an FOV changer. There were some flaws but the tools have now reached nearly 5,000 downloads and got covered in the media such as The Verge.

The later released solutions for Destroy All Humans!, Creaks, Roki, New Super Lucky's Tale, Tell Me Why, Drake Hollow, Halo 3 ODST, Lost in Vivo, Halo CE, Astroneer, Tales of Vesperia, Halo 4 and Twin Mirror haven't gained as much traction, but it's their existence that matters! Anyone who wishes to play the games in the future can do it on their wide display, and every positive experience is of value.

At times this year I felt like I could have done more but then I was also happy with my most complicated scripts and workarounds. Being on the verge of dropping everything and suddenly coming to a revelation - as it was with the most recent viewmodel fix for The Outer Worlds - is oddly satisfying! There were other breakthroughs too - the script for Death Stranding and a few others contained some novel calculations thought up by me. My Destroy All Humans! Lua experiments with applying the known aspect ratio to FOV formula to Unreal Engine 4 might have been what got me to notice and appreciate killer-m's simpler approach to doing the same, allowing to potentially improve many solutions going forward.

It looks like 2021 just might be quite fruitful as well!

Thank you very much for being with me through everything and showing all your kind gestures of support.

Happy holidays!