Rose

The Outer Worlds breakthrough

Added 2020-12-16 18:31:03 +0000 UTC

After the game release in October 2019, I was having a hard time downloading the game from Game Pass while other WSGF members were desperate for a solution.

Having downloaded it, I started working on a trainer, released shortly after. It's taken a full re-download (no thanks to Microsoft Store!), multiple approaches and all kinds of research to improve it over time.

I also tried fixing the viewmodel cropping, making a bit of progress as shared on the WSGF Discord (see the picture!). It must have been taking many hours and I may have had other tasks to do, so I paused. The community still really wanted a viewmodel solution.

A few months later, I lost my hard drive along with the little research I may have had. As other games kept coming out, I focused on fixing them and occasionally looked into The Outer Worlds every few months.

Feeling like trying again in a half-asleep state, I decided to give it another go. There were no new developments until late into the next day, after another day of reverse engineering.

Then I had a breakthrough! I found the operation responsible for the scaling of the weapon / hands model of the character. It's taken me some time to produce a script specific to this novel solution unprecedented in Unreal Engine 4 or other games. The original Borderlands was affected by the same thing at release and it was only years later that jackfuste fixed it.

Lately, I often felt like not making enough unique fixes, usually relying on my past research into games based on Unreal Engine 4, but this was a very special day for me. There is a thin line between burning out after endless hours of non-stop disassembling and a breakthrough, and so succeeding can be very soothing!