Outpost: Infinity Siege ultrawide cutscenes solution

One of my first observations related to this fusion of an FPS and tower defense game was that it scaled properly, preserving the vertical FOV. It was on Unreal Engine 5.3, so I thought the new default was working. Then it turned out not to be so rosy. But I probably could make it rosier, right?

Early on, it became evident that the game relies on cutscenes quite frequently but they are pillarboxed. As I always do, I first tried the publicly available solutions and my own patterns, some of which were found, but none did anything. So again I turned to adapting my knowledge to this game and finding the things to target. Removing the black bars wasn't enough, as I also had to correct the FOV at the cutscenes.

From then, much of the work revolved around trying to remove the black bars from the menu screens. Easy to ignore if it's only at the main menu, but more of an issue at the dialogue.

Though I had some concrete findings related to those black bars, they appeared to be tied specifically to the UI with no clear way to remove or reliably target them separately. Not unless I dig deeper and deeper.

Once again, it was all about the choice of dying on that hill or settling for the imperfection. I'm going for the latter.

What does this mean for the user? First, the black bars are completely gone from the cutscenes but still present at the menu screens. Second, and the thing that everyone will notice is that when selecting a dialogue option at the start of each dialogue, there will be black bars as well, but as soon as you click, the black bars will disappear.

In other words, the game is going to be full of the false impressions of presenting you with the black bars at first but then being free of them most of the time. Better than nothing! Downloadable here.