8Doors and two other games

It's been a pretty busy week with some ups and downs. Let's break it down!

Some days ago I was asked to look into Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner MARS and my first reaction would be to say I did not own the game but I found that there was a demo, so I began to disassemble it to see if I could prepare for the full version. Hours later, I found a pretty simple way to force the game to use the desktop resolution, but the thing about many Japanese games - reportedly because of their focus on consoles - is that they often rely on hardcoded resolutions as opposed to allowing for any but constraining to a specific aspect ratio. That also being the case here, finding the render resolution code has not been fruitful. As part of my strategy to avoid burning out, I chose to rest and possibly move on to other games.

Granted, there had been a request for a 21:9 mod for 8Doors: Arum's Afterlife Adventure, prompting me to request a copy through GOG. Another set of hours later, including some spent on less than ideal attempts to fix the UI, over the course of about two days, I chose to just go with a solution that removes the black bars without affecting the common Unity behavior of cropping the UI at wider resolutions. This results in most of the health bar being hidden, but not to the point of being off the screen at 21:9, which was satisfactory and playable in my testing. Download the patcher here!

Lastly, having had a prior look at the demo of Lost Words: Beyond the Page and made some observations, I got review access to the full version on GOG (while looking forward to one day getting the game on Steam) and so I have been working on a two-part solution for it. The developers were either kind or careless enough to leave most of the game code and debug files accessible, which slightly helped in navigating it (would you believe me if I said the files are in a folder called Lost Words_BackUpThisFolder_ButDontShipItWithYourGame?).

Doing what I do, I'm used more to pure assembly than anything else, but having a resolution-related debug string next to what I believe is relevant code does not hurt. I'm likely to release the 21:9 patcher later today!