Bioshock PC demo Widescreen patch

[662b8157cd072Kolya]

°bioshockMany widescreen gamers were unsatisfied with the way widescreen was implemented in Bioshock (as discussed on TTLG). This patch allows for more sophisticated widescreen support.
It was created by Racer_S from the "WideScreen Gaming Forum" (thread) and was hailed by 2K/TDFKAI themselves as an outstanding effort. Nevertheless they have made it clear that the normal widescreen of Bioshock is not a cropped 4:3 ratio as had been conjectured by fans. TDFKAI are now working on their own Field Of Vision (FOV) patch.

Software - BIOSHOCK FOV Hack - v1.2
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Disclaimer
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If this Application manipulates your game or computer in a harmful way,
I claim no responsibility.  I am not associated with the game developer
in any way and I am distributing this Application free of charge,
use at your own risk.
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Installation
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Unzip all contents to any folder you wish.

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Notes
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* Program can be closed once FOV applied

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Usage
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1) Run Trainer/Hack

2) Edit options if needed

3) Start Game

4) Press Numpad * to enable new FOV settings

5) You can safely Alt-Tab from game and change settings
 at any time

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Version History
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- Whats new in v1.2 on 8/25/07?
*added support for directx 10 mode

- Whats new in v1.1 on 8/22/07?
 *added support for full retail version
 *moved shift hotkey to CTRL
 *fixed bug with demo

- Whats new in v1.0 on 8/22/07?
 *first release

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Known Bugs
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* None
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Test Specs
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Tested on Windows XP SP2 w/DirectX 9.0c

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Contact - Bug Reports
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ToCA EDIT: http://tocaedit.com
Made by Racer_S

[662b8157cd5e5Kolya]

2K adresses the gamer protests about how widescreen was implemented in Bioshock:

THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDESCREEN
August 22, 2007

We understand there has been some concern about the implementation of widescreen mode in BioShock. Hopefully, we can clarify how we’ve chosen to do this.

The first thing we want to make clear is the mode we developed the game on and the optimal mode for playing the game is the widescreen mode. 90% of our development stations were widescreen displays: artists, programmers and designers.

- BioShock was primarily developed and tuned for widescreen mode. Artists and designers worked with widescreen displays and chose a field of view (FOV) that best reflected their intentions with respect to the way the world is perceived, the perceived speed of movement of the player relative to the world and the amount of the world they wanted to be viewed for the best game-play experience. We went through dozens of iterations and finally settled upon a widescreen aspect ratio that best suited the gameplay experience.

- When playing in widescreen modes the game makes use of the full screen resolution, and does not crop or stretch a lower resolution image into a wide screen one. For example, at 720p the game renders natively to the full 1280x720 resolution.

- Once this FOV was established, we chose to keep exactly the same horizontal FOV for standard def displays, so as not to in any way alter the gameplay experience.

- Instead of cropping the FOV for 4:3 displays and making all 4:3 owners mad in doing so, we slightly extended the vertical FOV for standard def mode: we never wanted to have black bars on people’s displays. (This way, everybody is happy…) This does mean that people playing on a standard def display see slightly more vertical space, but, this does not significantly affect the game-play experience and, we felt that it best served our goal of keeping the game experience as close as possible to the original design and art vision on both types of displays. Reports of the widescreen FOV being a crop of the 4:3 FOV are completely false.

One thing we can assure you that all these decisions were made with the best interests of the game in mind. We didn’t save any money or development time by choosing this set of parameters. We did what we thought was the best thing for the game: developing and optimizing it for widescreen displays, and making the decision not to do the usual crop for 4:3 displays. As a consumer, you certainly have the right to disagree.

We understand that not all users might not be happy with these choices and we will be looking into options for allowing users to adjust FOV settings manually. But as we mentioned earlier, changes to video game code do not happen in minutes or hours. We appreciate your understanding.

(As posted to the Cult of Rapture Update page)

[662b8157cd70cEvaUnit02]

There's a newer version of this program available that works with Bioshock v1.2.

[662b8157cd82cKolya]

Thanks for the heads up.... but the patch was updated to 1.2, not Bioshock. The 1.2 patch now adds DX10 support, otherwise it's the same. So if you run DX9, you don't need a new patch. In any case I put up the new patch.