16:9 or widescreen main menu/desktop for UT99?

[sc_neo]

Hey guys,
after playing this game for 20 years now and having spent the last couple of days giving it a fresh makeover with 4.69a, the DX11 renderer and the various HD 3 textures for the maps and weapons/items, i kinda wish there was an option to have the original main menu as 16:9 as well. There is actually a thread on reddit about this, with no solution as of yet.



In this thread user brazzjazz writes: "It seems to be really challenging using this 16:9 image as UT99 uses a very complicated setup. The background is not a single JPEG file or anything, but actually inside one or more unreal-specific files, even split into several tiles. That is why I couldn't easily get the source image in the first place."

Am i missing some obvious mod or solution for this or has this not been modded up to this day?

BTW: the games runs and looks gorgeous so a big thanks to everyone who kept at it over all the years keeping this jewel in tip-top shape!

[Hellkeeper]

The problem is that the background is a mosaic of severl 256*256 texture in the game and textures can only have size limits that are powers of two, that is 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 etc.
The issue you will have is that you can't easily make a 16:9 ratio (or even 16:10) with powers of two.
The solution I see would be to have a huge texture with the full picture and black blank space around it and center the screen on it so the blank parts are invisible.

[sc_neo]

Thanks for the info. Do you know which UT files contain those background menu tiles?

[Hellkeeper]

It's in UMenu.u, stored in your /system/ directory.
You can open it in the texture browser. Select "All files" in the type of file researched. By default the texture browser only sees .utx files but unreal extensions are only cosmetics: any .u?? filetype can contain scripts, textures, meshes, etc. all the same.