Combat Wings: Battle of Britain widescreen and wider solution
Added 2022-03-08 07:08:23 +0000 UTCIn the absence of notable releases or opportunity to get the most expensive and recent games, I responded to a request to fix this game from 2006 which lacked solutions even for 16:9. HaYDeN made fun of it, but I always try to cover all kinds of games and often act on requests irrespective of my personal interest or whether the game has 800K concurrent players on Steam, if you know what I mean!
That brings us to Combat Wings: Battle of Britain, which did not store its aspect ratio as a float, nor had a hardcoded resolution, making it a very unusual case. I got to the bottom of it and removed the black bars in a way that would work for all wide resolutions, however, that caused the subtitles and the minimap to overlap, meaning that some parts of the subtitles would be behind it at 21:9 and wider (as evidenced by the screenshots). There were some other UI issues, like the menu somewhat stretching, cutscenes letterboxing not having enough width, and some target markers losing alignment unless aimed at. Nevertheless, I found the game to be perfectly playable as I tested through a couple of missions at 21:9 and 32:9.
I spent hours of the next day trying to address the UI issues with a particular focus on the subtitles, and made some progress in getting to it, but still could not isolate it from the text of the menu screens. Most of the subtitles are for the speech in English, and just a few are for the minor remarks of the Germans, so they are not crucial but may be seen as an annoyance. Having learned from the past and the dangers of giving into my perfectionism which could easily produce nothing at all, I chose to release the fix regardless, hoping that its users will find the game perfectly playable as well. A week or two ago, a WSGF admin talked about another game and said that he did not mind the crashes caused by the fix, and preferred them over playing at 16:9. Well, if that's the extent of tolerance, then the issues of Combat Wings are almost nonexistent!
Download here.
