Stranger of Sword City plugin for GeDoSaTo

Stranger of Sword City is what seems like a pretty good dungeon crawler which just released on Steam. The port is decent (should run on a toaster, good input support), and the 2D art is gorgeous, but the 3D dungeons are rendered at 720p internally.

No one seems to have noticed, which is probably due to the general low detail and contrast of these backdrops and the fact that you concentrate on 2D stuff during the actual gameplay. Nonetheless, it bothered me, so I fixed it.

The fix was actually a bit more complicated than I had anticipated, since the game really sends of all 2D rendering with hard-coded coordinates in a 1280×720 system. Adjusting that resulted in 2D artifacting on continuous surfaces rendered at tiles which people might recognize from playing games at larger than native resolution in emulators.

I worked around this issue by some rather ad-hoc texture coordinate hacking, but the current result looks pretty good to me. Since I don’t want to spend much time on this the plugin is limited to a hardcoded internal rendering resolution of 3840×2160 (replacing the native 1280×720) – even at that resolution the game uses less than 15% of my 970, so most people on gaming PCs should be fine. Otherwise, you can simply not use GeDoSaTo for the game.

Native 720p

With GeDoSaTo, native 3840×2160

Getting this plugin to people easily and timely also forced me to push a lot of commits which were more experimental in nature (rather than sort through them all manually), meaning in practice that some stuff might be broken in this version. It might be a better idea not to update for now if you don’t want to play Stranger of Sword City.

If you are interested, you can get the latest version including this plugin by updating from within GeDoSaTo or with the installer provided here. As always, you can donate to support continuing GeDoSaTo development here.

Tales of Symphonia GeDoSaTo plugin

Edit: My article about this sordid affair is now up on PC Gamer.

I never expected that, but Tales of Symphonia was released resolution-locked. I’ve released a preliminary GeDoSaTo plugin for the game to fix that.

Note that when I say “preliminary” I mean with a total development and testing time of less than 3 hours. So if you run into issues, keep that in mind. (Of course, if you get crashes, or the game failing to launch, or anything like that, it might just as well be the game or its DRM system rather than GeDoSaTo)

Things to keep in mind:

  • The game name, for purposes of config files, screenshot paths, etc, is “Symphonia”. This is a bit of a hack due to the silly DRM they use.
  • As always with games with locked rendering resolution, you need to set your desired one from the .ini file ( config\Symphonia\GeDoSaTo.ini ). It looks like this by default:
  • There is a bit of an ugly interaction with some low-res processing going on. I might fix that if I can find the motivation.
  • Keep the in-game resolution setting at 720p, that’s the only thing I tested.

You can get the latest version including this plugin by updating from within GeDoSaTo or with the installer provided here. As always, you can donate to support continuing GeDoSaTo development here.

 

DPfix 0.1 alpha

So, Deadly Premonition PC was released today, locked at 720p.
DPfix aims to fix that.

This is the 0.1 alpha release, so don’t expect the features / relative stability of recent DSfix versions — this really has only been tested on my system, and the first half hour or so of the game.

It allows you to set the rendering and display resolutions of the game, and that’s pretty much it. For some of us, that’s the most important thing ;)

DPfix01alpha

Here’s a 2560×1440 screenshot of the game.

More to come, hopefully, later.

As always, donations are greatly appreciated but by no means necessary.

Edit - known issues with this alpha release:

  • The minimap appears in the wrong location.
  • Teleporting effects of enemies appear in the wrong location.

I’ll have a look at these as soon as possible.