Assassin's Creed Syndicate ultrawide and wider solution (and totally not a life update)
Added 2022-01-18 07:20:11 +0000 UTCBefore my previous post, I realized that I barely had the hard drive space needed to download games. As you may know, I try to keep all the games I've ever fixed on my hard drives so that I can verify reports of issues and check whether the tools are still compatible after game updates. I think they are some of the most reliable, but significant code changes still happen. Long story short, I took it to Ko-Fi again to ask for support in purchasing a new hard drive, as that platform is more suitable for one-time donations compared to Patreon. The beauty of Patreon, fueled by each of you, is the stability of knowing that my work will likely pay off today and tomorrow. You're extremely helpful as is, and I did not want to bother you with any requests!
After getting the hard drive successfully funded, I still had to wait for it to arrive and I knew exactly what to do next. There had been a request for a solution for Assassin's Creed Syndicate, but I was busy working on other things at the time, so I told the person the truth of it being my favorite series and promised to look into it later.
Having the hard drive connected, the game was the first thing I downloaded and it remains its only content for now!
As for the solution, it was not trivial, though let's preface it with the fact that the game used to have no black bars at its real-time cutscenes but received them in a later update. Makes no sense!
The first thing I tried was the usual startup routine of replacing the 16:9 aspect ratio bytes to see where it goes from there. Well, that was enough to immediately crash the game, pointing at it being protected. I also found that, like with Steam DRM, the code was obfuscated in the binary, so even something as simple as that aspect ratio would not be there to find. There was a VMProtect file right in the folder, so the answer seemed clear.
I tried attaching a debugger to locate and possibly bypass the VMProtect code, but that immediately resulted in an error message about that debugger. It was quite guarded, in contrast to all the other DRM solutions I see. For example, Steam DRM is easy to unpack, while Denuvo has absolutely no effect on my goals despite all the heat it gets. Even Minecraft Dungeons, which had regions with integrity checks similar to VMProtect - reportedly from using Themida - was not as strict.
I dug further into Syndicate for a bit and wondered whether it would be worth continuing or that my time would be better spent on another game. It was then that I happened to discover SunBeam's research into VMProtect and this very game. Knowing that, I could easily kill the thread responsible for the protection and modify the game at will, though I needed to also make it user-friendly. SunBeam's work came to the rescue again in the form of Paul44's Cheat Table containing a script for achieving the same thing.
I isolated the code and adapted it for my goal and I also added some to possibly future-proof the solution. I don't know what the code would look like in other versions, as the last one is all I have, so we will have to see if it works. If not, I should be able to update it.
Those steps still took hours and then the game was ready for being hacked. As if the anti-tampering hadn't been a huge annoyance, figuring out how to remove the black bars wasn't simple either. The game read its aspect ratio only at launch and then built on it, which meant that I had to locate and attempt to modify the real-time functions that wouldn't appear connected to it.
Hours on it again, I went from removing the pillarboxing and having the menu broken, to removing the pillarboxing and stretching the FMVs, to finally removing the pillarboxing from the real-time cutscenes but not from the FMVs, keeping the aspect ratio of the videos intact, making it a step up even from the native support in AC Unity. There were other behaviors in between but those are the ones of importance.
That wraps it up for the solution. I think it's a promising start with the new hard drive! Sorry for the lengthy read! Wait, I forgot to tell you about a wiki I'm working on. Another time then?
