Solar Ash ultrawide and wider solution (Patreon)

It's 2024 and yet my first fix this year is for a game released in 2021.

It feels like it's been a while since I fixed a game built on an older version of Unreal Engine. This one was from a time when merely changing the FOV axis to YFOV wasn't enough, as there was no recalculation, so the engine just changed the horizontal value to be vertical, which was too much. The landmark fixes of that time were from killer-m, which definitely inspired or were the basis of a number of my own, as mentioned in my prior posts and on the pages of my solutions.

So as before, I not only had to remove the black bars, but also recalculate the FOV for Solar Ash. This didn't require much, as we've been through the matter time and time again. The unique issue was the offset UI.

The issue of offset interaction prompts was what got a WSGF user to ping me and mention my fix for The Expanse. Looked like a reasonable request, so I went ahead to investigate.

Sadly, and as I often say, the old pattern was of no help, and neither were any of the public patterns I could find. For the UI elements, I had to start over. After looking at the code over the course of a day, I was able to manipulate the interaction prompts, so all I needed to do was find a reliable way to modify all of them without distortion. Once that was done, I let the person test it and no issues were reported, but in my own testing, I discovered that the prompts still got cut off at 32:9 and wider.

For most of the following days, I looked for a way to address the issue in a different way. The findings led me to just one seemingly stable approach. It came with the following differences from the original test version, as shared by me on the WSGF Discord:

Pros:
- Fixes the vert- FOV (addressing my mistake in the original)
- Fixes the prompts for all aspect ratios
- Spans the HUD and screen effects, which is good for ultrawide
Cons:
- Stretches the menu backgrounds
- The HUD spanning is undesirable at 48:9

I tested this new version for a bit and sent the file to two other WSGF members. Now that both have told me the fix works fine and there are no issues beyond those noted, I'm releasing it.