Witcher 2 - letter box

[silhouette]

[quote]OOHLALAAA! It works with my retail 1.1 .exe :D

Hayden...You are the man! And if you weren't a man, I would kiss you! :D

Any1 else can confirm this? Shall I finally buy this game and play it on 4:3 monitor with no letterbox? :D

Buy the game! It's an awesome RPG that treats the gamer with respect. No dumbing down despite the game can played with a gamepad. But the beginning is difficult as hell, you have been warned... :)

[hellghast]

[quote][quote]OOHLALAAA! It works with my retail 1.1 .exe :D

Hayden...You are the man! And if you weren't a man, I would kiss you! :D

Any1 else can confirm this? Shall I finally buy this game and play it on 4:3 monitor with no letterbox? :D

Buy the game! It's an awesome RPG that treats the gamer with respect. No dumbing down despite the game can played with a gamepad. But the beginning is difficult as hell, you have been warned... :)

Don't worry. I will buy this game for sure. I know it is an awesome game and that's why I refuse to play it with black bars. It ruins game experience so I will wait until it is fixed. :D

[leondres]

I can confirm the new fix is working for my gog version 1.1 as well, thanks hayden! I'm only in chapter 1 so no clue if it has issues with later in the game as of yet.

[helifax]

I have a very weird behaviour....here for the GoG 1.1 Version...running on nVidia card.(I know the Surround aspect is fixed by the patch but I don't like that during cutscenes I get only central monitor view. )

It's hard to describe it but it's like this:
The image flickers like someone is doing a very rapid resize of the whole image. for 1 second the image is in the original format than for 1 second is resized and for 1 second is in original format back and so on and so on...

Hayden, any ideea why this is happening?

[HaYDeN]

you will need to explain better as I don't understand.

The only thing I can think of is sometimes when the engine switches to rendering for <1 second before the GUI overlay kicks in during loading scenes and stuff.

[helifax]

you will need to explain better as I don't understand.

The only thing I can think of is sometimes when the engine switches to rendering for <1 second before the GUI overlay kicks in during loading scenes and stuff.

I will try to record and show you:)

Edit: here is a link to a video I recored and put on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCYNDHY0Cn8
If you want I can send the avi via e-mail (is higher res)

Also I noticed that if I put the flawless tool in the Wicher 2bin folder and try to start the app from there it crashes. But if I launch it from a different location like a folder on a desktop it loads up.

[HaYDeN]

Oh I get you now....

Clearly things operate differently when you are running on Nvidia gear, this suggests to me that those values are being constantly written to, whenever flawless updates the values they are being overwritten, on ATI etc this does not happen, the values are static and not changed except after screen loads and stuff, but just the once.

I write my values every 50 milliseconds, even that is overkill - in your situation it would need to constantly write to those values as to overwrite what the application is natively doing, or one would have to remove the offending assembly from the executable responsible for updating those values (the better choice) - I don't have nVidia gear so I am not in a position to fix this for you easily... you would need to fire up something like CheatEngine, find out what ASM is writing to those values then NOP them out.

They've actually made the experience WORSE for nvidia users if this is the case (by making fixing it a bitch), there is no need for them to be continuously writing those values.

[helifax]

Oh I get you now....

Clearly things operate differently when you are running on Nvidia gear, this suggests to me that those values are being constantly written to, whenever flawless updates the values they are being overwritten, on ATI etc this does not happen, the values are static and not changed except after screen loads and stuff, but just the once.

I write my values every 50 milliseconds, even that is overkill - in your situation it would need to constantly write to those values as to overwrite what the application is natively doing, or one would have to remove the offending assembly from the executable responsible for updating those values (the better choice) - I don't have nVidia gear so I am not in a position to fix this for you easily... you would need to fire up something like CheatEngine, find out what ASM is writing to those values then NOP them out.

They've actually made the experience WORSE for nvidia users if this is the case (by making fixing it a bitch), there is no need for them to be continuously writing those values.

Damn... this is their so called "Surround optimization".... no bezel corrected resolution and 1 monitor cutscenes.... Your tool with v1.0 of the game provided a WAAY better performance than their so called patch...
If it would help I could use CheatEngine and try to find out what is happing and what is written in the values but I don't know exactly what I'm looking for...

Can you please tell me what to look for in order to "freeze" the content of that variable?:)

Thanks

[HaYDeN]

Hold on, trying to see if I can find the nvidia specific stuff .

In the meantime, see if this (nasty hacky workaround) works - http://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/fws.zip

[FasterThanFTL]

I used this mod in the link to remove most of the hud along with your Flawless Widescreen Tool and now the white dots are gone, Thanks a lot lot Hayden I have been following this topic from Day 1 I really appreciate your dedication. People like you are the reason PC Gaming is the best and will continue to do so.

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/the_witcher_2/quick_mod_hud_b_gone_static_edition/page1

[helifax]

Hold on, trying to see if I can find the nvidia specific stuff .

In the meantime, see if this (nasty hacky workaround) works - http://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/fws.zip

This nasty hacky hackzor hack works! but...I could not use the included flawless.exe So I used the one from 1.05 version (it kept crushing when trying to open it).

Still I noticed that after loading a game and entering the menu...the game tries to "resize" the image for a couple of seconds. This happen only in menu so it's nothing big and everyone can live with it.

I will try to see if I use a bezel corrected resolution everything is in order.. I tried on 5040 atm and everything was splitted in 2 where the bezels are.

Anyway Awesome work!! (around or hack:)))

[HaYDeN]

clearly its not really compatible with Nvidia anymore, I'm battling their implementation. (not sure if the same strange behaviour happens in non-surround resolutions)

and re the bezel corrected resolutions, again if they have some code that is changing the resolution from your requested resolution to something else, then no it wont work.

[helifax]

clearly its not really compatible with Nvidia anymore, I'm battling their implementation. (not sure if the same strange behaviour happens in non-surround resolutions)

and re the bezel corrected resolutions, again if they have some code that is changing the resolution from your requested resolution to something else, then no it wont work.

Bezel Corrected Resolutions work properly with the fix (unlike in the official patch which doesn't know about this and still renders on 5040x1050 ....>:<)

Well it seems that you are winning the fight as it works very well. As a suggestion you could add a separate checkbox (option) in the program like "Nvidia Surround hardware hack" or something. It's your work and I find it very good even if it's not very "catholic".

Thank again:) I can finally play "as ment to be played". You rock!

Ps: the provided exe failed to load. It crashed with the following (don't know if it really helps):

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: flawlessws.exe
Application Version: 0.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 4de0ebd0
Fault Module Name: StackHash_a356
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7600.16559
Fault Module Timestamp: 4ba9b29c
Exception Code: c0000374
Exception Offset: 000cdc9b
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: a356
Additional Information 2: a3567fa5f898cd483d7d54ab70a5e9c6
Additional Information 3: 4952
Additional Information 4: 4952554a977b6f15c0406118ccc0be35

[HaYDeN]

[quote] As a suggestion you could add a separate checkbox (option) in the program like "Nvidia Surround hardware hack" or something.

Done.

Actually what you missed was I re-edited that post to remove the link but you had already downloaded it helifax... I later changed it to fws.zip, so ignore the crashing... download the new update.

[helifax]

[quote][quote] As a suggestion you could add a separate checkbox (option) in the program like "Nvidia Surround hardware hack" or something.

Done.

Actually what you missed was I re-edited that post to remove the link but you had already downloaded it helifax... I later changed it to fws.zip, so ignore the crashing... download the new update.

I tried to re-download http://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/fws.zip but file is not found :(

Edit: ah nevermind:) the tool auto-updated:D So I will try it now and see what happens:D

[HaYDeN]

Update it normally, Settings -> Check for Updates... I've deployed to public now.

It literally brute forces the values, it'll do for now I suspect.

[helifax]

Update it normally, Settings -> Check for Updates... I've deployed to public now.

Yes working properly now:D Your the man:)) hehe thanks:)) for putting my name there for the workaround:)) but it's your work..I only recorded the problem and report it:))

It literally brute forces the values, it'll do for now I suspect.

Yes, it works good for now! Hope and the future they will change the stupidity they are doing of rewritting the value over and over again.

[HaYDeN]

Well if they were just not being such sticklers for keeping to 16:9 and writing the "right value" none of this would have ever have been a problem.

I rekon they should:
Unlock all aspects (including wide, non 16:9) for both ATI and nVidia.
Make the HUD scale correctly on <16:9
Remove the white dots from the HUD overlay.

Boom, _everyone_ is happy.

[helifax]

Well if they were just not being such sticklers for keeping to 16:9 and writing the "right value" none of this would have ever have been a problem.

I rekon they should:
Unlock all aspects (including wide, non 16:9) for both ATI and nVidia.
Make the HUD scale correctly on <16:9
Remove the white dots from the HUD overlay.

Boom, _everyone_ is happy.

Indeed! I don't understand why they "locked" everything up in the first place.... Most LCD's are 16:10 anyway....
They made a powerful engine only to be "locked" up in a very weird and bizzare way...

[Cinnabuns]

For me, with the game running at 5916x1200, I can only get the fix to work by checking the boxes,

* Remove Vertical Black Bars
* Stretch HUD Vertically
* nVidia Workaround

I find this odd, because it removes the top and bottom Horizontal black bars, there aren't and never were Vertical black bars.

Also the Fix detects 5760x1200 res and not 5916x1200 that the game is actally set to. Bezel correction is also not working (probably because of the resolution not being the BC'd res).

With the nVidia Workaround checked I occasionally get a 2" high, bright red bar across the bottom of the center monitor that flashes 1 time and then you don't see it flash again for quite a while. It hasn't caused any crashes though.

In cutscenes I now also get the old behavior where the mouse is locked to the right monitor and can't select any dialog options.

One excellent side effect of using your fix though is that my frames without it dipped down to 19 er so in the city at times. With the fix it never goes below 24 and my max frames are also exactly 10fps higher with the Fix running. Sweet!

Thanks for your continuing work, HaYDeN, you definitely rock! :rockout