Witcher 3 Triple Monitor Cutscene Fix

So I've been playing The Witcher 3 a lot lately, and I've set up a triple monitor Nvidia Surround system on my computer. This means I can play the game and have it span across all three of my monitors for a peripheral vision level of widescreen.

Problem is, however, that the in-game cutscenes block out my left and right monitors. This is most likely put in place because the developers wanted to hide various things off-screen, since the game was not designed with this level of widescreen in mind.

But whether I see characters in a funky T-pose that are supposed to be off-screen, or people appearing and disappearing suddenly as they're supposed to walk into the scene, etc, I still want to see these cutscenes span all three of my monitors!

So I looked around everywhere online, and all I could find was a hex fix for the game's exe file to make the cutscenes span across a 21:9 aspect ratio. My system is much wider than that, but this at least gave me a basis on where to start. This was a major clue, so all I needed to figure out was how to modify the game exe's hex data myself.

I downloaded a piece of software called HxD, which allows me to access and easily modify the hex data of exe files, and many other things. I loaded in the game's exe file and, with the help of some online forums, discovered that people were creating the hex hack by changing a particular set of hex values within the exe. By default, a game running with a regular 16:9 display should have these hex values in this order within the exe file:

39 8E E3 3F

So the fix they came up with was to replace that sequence with this one, which is supposed to span the cutscenes across a 21:9 display:

8A E3 18 40

I have no idea what these numbers represent, so I did some more digging and discovered that people found these numbers by converting the existing hex values into a "floating point" value. I still have no bloody idea what's going on, so I figure I'll look up some floating point to hex conversion charts online and see if I can piece something together to make this make sense.

Having the knowledge that the floating point value people were using for the 21:9 ratio was 2.38888, I figured if I can convert that backwards and get the same hex value they did, I'd have figured out how to convert these numbers back and forth.

I tried it and got a completely different series of numbers, so I tried it in reverse, to see what floating point number I would get from the hex. Again, totally different numbers.

So clearly this wasn't right, and I still had no idea what I was doing. So I began to think outside of the box, and I looked up the exact resolution I'm running on these three monitors, 5760x1080, to see if anyone else has messed with converting this into a floating point or hex value. Turns out some crazy group of gamers did something similar with Dark Souls. But unfortunately, their hex values somehow made even less sense within this context, so that didn't really lead me anywhere.

I took the hex values I had for The Witcher 3 apart, converting them into decimal and back in different ways to see if any of this made any sense in relation to my actual horizontal resolution. It didn't.

Having messed with the hex values a few times and tested them in-game at this point, I had to find those hex values by looking up the unchanging values that immediately followed it using the CTRL-F find command:

55 55 15 40

In a final moment of almost giving up, I realized that really, what I have to do is come up with something somewhere in the general ballpark of what I need. This hex value probably just needs to be bigger, because it's clearly representing only the horizontal section of the cutscene blocks. So I went back to that floating point conversion website and played around with turning the floating point numbers into hex values until I found one that I thought "looked right". Still, I barely knew what I was doing, and was going purely off of instinct. But I figured I backed up my exe file a long time ago, so what's the harm in giving this a shot? What's the worst that could happen?

So I changed the hex values in question within the exe file to:

40 18 E3 69

I figured this might stretch the black bars off my left and right screens a little more, giving me an idea of how much further I'd need to raise this number. I booted the game up to give it a test and entered into a cutscene.

The blackness that blocked most of the cutscene visuals from my left and right screens was completely gone, and the in-game performance wasn't affected in the slightest. It accomplished exactly what I was trying to do, and it happened on accident.

So yeah. I had no idea what I was doing, but hey, whatever it did certainly worked. And this is why I always tell people to just go for it. Think about it. Whether you know what you're doing or not, take advantage of Google. Ask questions. Take advantage of our ability to deduce and reason. That's how I've gotten this far!

The floating point to hex converter I used was from this website:
https://gregstoll.dyndns.org/~gregstoll/floattohex/
I want to give some credit to the people on this forum page, because this particular page helped me immensely:
http://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=160343

Amnesia and Creepy Science Lab Dream

From October 10th, 2017:

I just had a dream in which I can remember nothing of who I am, and I'm in some kind of facility, kind of like a science lab mixed with hospital mixed with mental patient experiment ward... Kinda creepy. I have no clothes, but I don't find my trans body at all out of the ordinary, and I make no effort to hide it. Somehow I get out of my room and I'm exploring through the facility. It's surprisingly warm, so I'm not shivering. Cameras on the ceiling follow me as I wander around trying to figure out what this place is and who I am, because I don't even know my own name.

Eventually I run into a room that actually has people in it. But they don't rush me or freak out that I'm loose. Instead they just keep an eye on me, letting me look through the room a bit. Someone must have slipped me something somehow or something, because I began to feel pretty loopy at some point in this room. I found a section with a bunch of hanging clothes, hanging from a rack attached to the ceiling. I gravitated toward a particular group of feminine clothes, saying someone had good taste, and I liked them. The person observing me indicated they were mine, but did not speak. I replied "Well that makes so much sense. So I can put them on?" They nodded yes and let me clothe myself, seemingly fascinated by my every movement. It really felt like they understood what I was saying, they were just silent.

I start asking questions like what my name is and how I got there, but everyone is just looking at me strange. I ask what the place is, with no reply. The only communication I get is from facial expressions and body gestures, and even those were few. I start to really feel faint and weird, and I start (almost drunkenly) genuinely complimenting the skin and hourglass figure of another patient in the room. She smiled, but no words or other body movements as she lay on the odd hospital table thing. I asked if any of the other patients knew who I was, but they just smiled at me. As I'm stumbling a little over myself and grabbing a wall for support, one of the ward people takes me by the arm to help me walk. They start leading me somewhere outside the room. I black out with my arm around a ward's shoulder, not knowing where I'm being taken.

And then I woke up in my bed in "real life", feeling very disoriented, with the clothes I put on in the dream on the floor by my bed. I suddenly remember my name. That would be more weird if I weren't wearing those yesterday, but thank god. I suddenly remember where I am and who I am. Memories flooded back to me, but I still felt kind of loopy...

Dreams are fascinating... It really makes me wonder sometimes if I'm actually taken someplace else while I sleep. Maybe my mind found itself in another plane of existence for a while, and the people there were studying me...?

... I need to go to work now... What a great start to the day -_-

The Cop Dream

As long as we're talking about my dreams on this blog, I pulled another one out of my archive. I am very happy to report that this is no longer a recurring dream. I'm pretty sure I've had this dream about 3 or 4 times before, always ending with me dying via gunshot wound, and I never got away. I rarely even managed to hide. The events of this particular one ended the chain, possibly because, out of all of them, it was the most lucid.

This is copied and pasted from my archive. The only edits I did was to fix a few typos and misspellings, and a couple of sentences were very hard to read.

So here it is:

Notes From The Cop Dream, January 31st, 2013:

A dream I swear I've had before. Repeated in the same fashion. But I don't remember pulling the same kinds of stunts to get away last time.

I don't quite remember how it starts. It's some kind of thing where me and a group of people are walking through some kind of exhibit. We're looking at these weird things that remain from someone crazy who murdered some people. The mention of Alfred Hitchcock's name came up. We watched someone take a running dive off a high ledge and land right on their head. It looked incredibly real, but apparently it was a re-enactment of the movie that all of this was based off of.

By the end of this, our apparent 'tour' came to a halt and we all gathered into another area on the boat we're on to eat snacks. During the snacks, a cop shows up and recognizes me as some kind of murderer. The cop is Frasier's dad [from the TV show]. He shoots me dead.

The dream then restarts where that man runs off the ledge committing suicide. Each time it restarts I remember how I died last time and I try to prevent it. However, I remembered the last time I had this chain of dreams. I remembered all kinds of stunts I pulled on the boat to kill the cop and get away. I remember all kinds of attempts to hide. All previous attempts of that nature ended in failure.

So I tried something drastically new this time. I can't swim, so I thought what if I tried something that the dream knew I couldn't do. I found an area close to land that we passed by every time the dream restarted, before the cop was even part of the scenario yet, and I jumped off the boat and swam for the shore. Somehow, to my surprise, I was able to swim. I made it quite far away from the boat before I noticed the boat stopping, and some gunshots were being fired at me. I was shot and killed soon after I got to shore. I remember seeing that familiar laughter as the cop approached and his comerades congratulated him.

The dream restarted again.

I tried the swimming approach again, as it seemed promising. I got to the other end of the "dream wall" this time (natural barrier preventing me from going directly away from the ship) before I was no longer able to get further away and I had to make my way to a fence along the islands to the north. As I made my way to the fence, I hid behind trees, curving my slender body against them to prevent shots from hitting me. I made breaks for it when I felt like they had to reload. I finally made it to the fence and realized I didn't know how to get over it. I improvised, thinking that no matter how I hurt myself on the fence now, I'll be killed if I don't get over it. I managed to climb and jump over it, only to find there was a large cliff. The fence dropped off to a deep ravine, and there was another fence on the other side of the ravine, just like the one I was hanging onto.

I jumped from the cliff face over to the other side, and suddenly something very strange happened.

The entire scene in my dream turned to a third person view and looked exactly like some kind of Indiana Jones style movie opening sequence. I didn't make the jump, and as I was hanging off the cliff, an Indiana Jones silhouette was being cast over the cliff face somehow. Somewhere in here I also saw the face of my video production teacher, Rob Nyland, kind of transparently pasted over the whole third-person scene. That was very confusing. As the sequence progressed, part of the cliff face started to move and began to crush my finger. As I got my crushed finger free of the rock face I fell. Next thing I knew I was shaking my head in a daze. I had apparently never gone to the other side of that fence at all. I was laying just outside of it with the cop standing over me, doing that familiar laugh, just like every time he gets me with his comrades.

The dream restarted again. Frustrated with how the swimming approach didn't work and the fence seemed to be a fake, this time I ran to the head of the ship to jump off of it the instant it gets to land. I hid as best I could, and managed to get off the ship in time. I pulled some climbing stunts and got to a hiding place in an indentation on the rocky cliff face near the fence. This time I got to the fence from the opposite side - the side the cop got to me from last time [I'm confused by this phrasing too]. I hid with my back against the rocks. This was the best hiding place I had found from the cop yet, and the farthest away I have managed, but that didn't last too long. As his comrades searched for me, some of them came dangerously close to seeing my feet.

While I stood there, I had time to think. They're going to find me eventually. There's no way out. I'm clearly trapped. The only actual way out, the fence, turned out to be a trap that gave me nothing but false hope. The trap actually transformed my dream, bending the dream to keep me there. Can he transform my dreams? Bend them to his will? I don't think there's an actual way to fight him, or to run away from him.

So I made my location known to the cop's comrades (who turned out to be all of the other people in that group from the tour), raised my hands, and yelled for them to take me to the cop (I used his name, but I forget what it was). One of them shot me in the hand before I jumped down from my hiding place. After the shot to the hand I yelled "No! Take me to [the cop]! He's going to kill me, not you!" I walked toward the cop as I saw him approaching my hiding place from near the ship. I congratulated his genius, and told him he's unbeatable. Right after he acknowledged that I was a tough person to catch, he shot me directly in the heart.

As I was dying, this time it was totally different. I was still alive, still talking with the cop as I was dying somehow, as though we had known each other for a very long time. I don't remember all that he was saying, but it was like a series of flashbacks. I saw him in the future, after he gets shot in the hip, teaching classes. I saw him on his deathbed. I saw him as he is now. He gave me a hug and I died. But one thing - one question was repeated during the flashbacks: "What comes after the after?" I think it was. The cop was asking me this question repeatedly, and I couldn't answer.

The dream went totally black and ended shortly after I died. I woke up with a gasping breath in a cold sweat, still feeling the pain in my hand, and in my heart and chest. The pain in my hand didn't completely go away until I started typing this for about 5 minutes. The pain in my chest turned into a pressure feeling soon after I got out of bed, then the pressure feeling went away after about 4 minutes of typing.

I hope this different ending that I got after giving up ends this chain. Because I never want to have that dream again.

Minecraft Class, Part 2

So here we are, about a month later. 

This year's Minecraft classes are progressing about as usual. I have two classes, a middle school, and a high school class. I've given them a decent amount of time now to develop survival skills and get their crops growing so they don't starve to death.

I've assigned, and finished grading, the Critical Thinking: Survival assignment. 

It took 2 hours to go through all those assignments, since I like to give individual feedback to each student. I spent 5 hours straight overall grading assignments for all my classes that day, none of which I got paid for, because I used my 3 hours of prep time that week preparing for that week's class activities. But I digress...

I had some interesting assignment answers. One student in particular stood out, saying he was going to build a 3-dimensional wheat farm with a circulatory system of water columns for irrigation. I'm really quite interested to see how that develops, because I have never heard of someone making a farm like that before.

Of course, I do get some students in these classes who start off not taking it seriously.

They'll say stupid one-word things for their answers, clearly not trying. These are the students who learn that it's possible to fail in Minecraft class. For the first time in a long time I had to give a student an incomplete on his assignment and, in our monthly pass/fail system, he failed our second month of class. But there are also students who clearly know the answers, and are just goofing off and not trying. I'll give them feedback that speaks to their meme culture, and then tell them that, seriously, if you don't take this seriously, you shall not pass. Here is a picture of one such student's work. The additional comments was my feedback to him:

On another note, I've introduced blacksmithing.

I demonstrated how to do it by making a couple of powerful tools - a pickaxe and a broadsword - and giving them away at random to people who raised their hand when I asked who wanted them. Both classes have already built smelters to melt and cast metals, but it's looking like the high school class is making better tools from those facilities, and at a faster pace.

When I asked if they had developed a sustainable food source yet, a little over half the middle school class raised their hands. But in the high school class, all but one of the students raised their hands. So I decided to introduce the government options to the high school class a couple weeks earlier than the middle school class.

Upon introducing the government options, I had a second student bring a new option to the table.

He suggested a Feudal Monarchy, where the King would give land to nobles, and the nobles would essentially rule over different provinces. So that was added to the list. It got a surprising number of bites.

The next class after the government option lecture, we assigned groups.

I had students put their names under the options they chose. I'm sad to say that the Theocracy option only got one student, and therefore did not have enough people to become a group. However, the student who chose theocracy moved his name over to the Feudal Monarchy. This student is likely going to act as a priest who preaches the word of the prophets, while still attending to his duties as a citizen within the group, serving the king. 

I'm thinking I will set up a few divine signs in the world, regardless of the theocracy option becoming a group.

It should be interesting to see what happens. For my first "divine sign" I'm thinking I will create a subtle path of tiny metals, mixed into gravel, near the residence of the priest. If the priest notices the tiny metal shavings in the gravel and follows the path to the correct location, he will find a white tree with blue sparkling leaves, unlike any other tree in the world.

If he destroys the tree, I will create a thunderstorm shortly after it is destroyed. The next night the moon will glow red and poisonous spiders will show up in the kingdom's mine shafts. Then everything will be back to normal come daybreak and the signs will stop for a couple weeks.

If he creates a shrine around the tree, or otherwise protects it or nourishes it, I will secretly plant flowers that emit light in a bluish-white glow. Then, depending on how he reacts to the flowers, I'll go from there. If he places a chest in the shrine, I might sneak in and place something in it as a sign that the gods are happy. 

The next signs after that for a while will target unsuspecting people from different civilizations, and I wholly expect it will go over their heads. But we won't know until we try it.

I let the students come up with their own names for their civilizations.

Here is a list of the groups we have so far in the high school class:

Revenant - Anarchy (no leader, no laws)

It's looking like this group is going to be the rebels of the class. We'll see how long they manage to remain an anarchy. One of the inhabitants of this group was citizen of Highrock, a Constitutional Monarchy group from last year. You'll hear about that group in my next Minecraft Memories post.

(still deciding on a name) - Democracy

This group is currently determining whether they are a representative democracy or not. They seem a bit disorganized, so I'm hoping they elect a representative to help them get organized, otherwise they may fall into anarchy. One of the group members is the former president of the Bone Archer Republic, but it's looking like he's not opting for the role of a ruler this time around.

Rapid Fire Goat Birth - Republic

Sometime within the next couple of weeks they will be holding an election to determine the president. But before then, they're working on a consensus for what should be contained within their constitution. 

This group contains the nomad who threatened nuclear war in my first Minecraft Memories post, another citizen from Highrock, and a citizen from The Brotherhood of Anarchy, a non-representative socialist democracy group from the 2016 school year. Having this many students from previous classes and different backgrounds should be interesting to watch.

Dead Bush Empire - Feudal Monarchy - Imperator: Milo

This group contains a citizen from Lakeside, a Communism society from last year in the same class as Highrock. This is also the group with the priest who tried to start a theocracy.

To my surprise, this group already has a leader. How the leader was chosen isn't exactly clear to me, but everybody follows him somehow. He has chosen the title Imperator, which is actually a word I did not know until now. From Roman history, apparently Imperator was a title bestowed upon an emperor. The title is supposed to refer to an absolute or supreme ruler.

This group is surprising me with their coordination and productivity. Imperator Milo seems to know what needs to be done, and with him at the helm, who knows what we'll see next.

So there you have it.

I introduce you to the Friday class of this 2018 school year. We'll be assigning groups in the Thursday class soon, so you'll be learning about them once that's settled.

The Comments Section, Part 10 (Human Rights Posts)

Facebook post from July 15th, 2017:

To any men's rights people out there: You do not need to campaign for your rights because your rights as white men are not in danger. That is why people find your efforts offensive.

While women, black people, and the LGBTQ communities are trying to bring attention to the fact they're discriminated against, men's right activists are out there bringing attention to themselves like children who feel left out.

White men are not in danger from discrimination. Hogging the spotlight only distracts from and worsens the actual discrimination issues.

-----

Facebook post from August 6th, 2017:

[Posted a link to a YouTube video called What Your Doctor Wants To Tell You, But Can't (From A Medical Physician)]

It's so sad that so many Americans lack enough common sense to make this a problem... We need to do what we can to stop contributing to this issue. We are a large part of why so many doctors just zone out and don't even care.

If I were a doctor in those situations, in order to survive, I could totally see myself giving up the fight eventually and just writing out the requested prescriptions. And that's what reinforces the spreading drug addictions.



I'm quite alarmed by those doctor suicide statistics, and I think continuing to bring a whimsical attitude to their day and thanking them for their efforts and tedious work after each visit might go a long way in helping with that.

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Facebook post from August 14, 2017:

So black people have been getting shot or otherwise harmed and killed left and right by neo-nazi racists for years. Lots of them. And the only outrage and coverage it was getting was on the news and social media, and some protests.

One white girl gets killed by neo-nazis, and now it's all over the news and social media, but now suddenly it's also being talked about with more widespread variety on different networks, people in high places are saying stronger things, Illinois officially labels neo-nazi groups as being terrorists, and the public outcry generally seems more intense.

Nothing has changed except that the racists have stopped hiding their faces, started targeting white people, and started showing more of what they truly are by wielding torches.


Ughhhh.....

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Facebook comment from October 31st, 2017:

I had a mother with her two kids snicker to themselves in the lobby when I was getting my birth certificate changed. The mother said, with a snickering smile on her face, "He used to be a man." Her daughter chimed in, "I wouldn't wanna be a boy!" and they giggled quietly.


Yeah. You wouldn't want to be a boy. That's great. Neither did I!