Revisiting Earthlock & Unity UI

One of my first solutions uploaded to PCGamingWiki was an ultrawide mod for Earthlock in 2019. The founder ended up featuring it, which has resulted in over 1000 downloads.

A few days ago a comment appeared, stating that it was not compatible with the latest Steam version. I was not surprised, considering that the solution was more like a regular mod made up of modified files rather than a patcher - a game update involving those files would easily lead to issues, as reported.

So I downloaded the game again to revisit it, research from scratch, and bring it to parity with my latest solutions, which are meant to last across updates and work for various display configurations. Patching to unlock all resolutions and remove the black bars was not a problem, as I had done it for this very game before.

However, the user also reported that a button prompt was out of view. Normally I would just ignore most UI issues, as I've come to learn how tough they can be to fix, so my first idea was to just have it as a known issue, but I decided to keep tinkering for any luck.

I kept it up over the course of two days and many hours, first finding a way to manipulate the placement of a single button, then the whole thing via the aspect ratio, then getting to the function responsible, and finally spending many more hours to implement it in a way that would be wildcard-based and more likely to last. I could just have a patcher search for the exact code I want to target and replace it with the specific code I want to be read, but that would have been too easy and potentially unreliable!

The whole experience also got me to wonder whether the 1000 downloads have been of a solution that has all of the interaction prompts out of view. I'd rather not check and enjoy the outcome of today, which might help me do more of this in other Unity games!