Widescreen Gaming Forum

Salut WSG Community.

Are there any news for Settlers III? Did someone figure out how to play it comfortably in WS-resolutions? If not. Uhm. May someone maybe take another look into it? It such a great game and it would be a joy to play it in higher resolutions.

And by the way. I´m missing the S4 Hex Code for 1600x900. Can someone give it to me pls?

Regards!

I believe I made some progress with The Settlers III:

I am able to change the height of the game window, but any height bigger then 864px causes the game to crash. Before I go into details about the crash, here is how to change the height of the game window:

1. Open s3.exe with a Hex-Editor of your choice
2. Increase the 1024x768 resolution of the game as described earlier in this thread
3. find the first occurence of B8 00 03 00 00 (starting at address 0x000C6EBF) Don't touch the B8, but the 00 03 00 00 can be set to any value (within limits).
4. Change to one of the values below for increased height:

• 768px: B800030000
• 800px: B820030000
• 864px: B860030000

A value of 880px or more results in a crash with one of the following error mesages:




Further notes:

• The second error only occurs if you increase the height just a little bit too much (e.g. to B8 80 03 00 00)
• I only tried increasing the height in multiples of 16: A height of 864px works, while 880px crash the game. I have not tried the values in between, so it might be possible to get a few more px without crashing the game.
• Is it possible that the game does not allocate enough memory to display a bigger game window? It would explain the exceptions if the game tries to access memory it didn't allocate first...
• The white bar at the top of the screen appears even in an unmodified game, since I upgraded to Windows 10. It seems that starting with Windows 8, Windows tries to paint some kind of window around the game, even in fullscreen mode.

The Settlers III fullscreen border fix should resolve the white border issue. You can make fixes for affected games using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (make a fix that includes ForceSimpleWindow, then save and install the fix package). Several pre-made fixes are available on PCGamingWiki.

I figured out how to change the width of the game! I don't have enough time to write a detailed post right now, but I will post the details later.

Thank you Garrett, your border-fix works!

Sorry it took so long, but here is the post I promised. Before I go into details, here is a list of what is possible at the moment:

• It is possible to change the screen resolution the game runs with, while the size of the game-area stays the same (as described by balver)
• It is possible to change the height and width of the game-area, within the following limits:
  
  • The width of the game-area must be smaller than 1310px (0x51E in Hex)
  • The height of the game-area can only be increased above ~864px by decreasing the width
  • The width can only be increased above ~920px by decreasing the height (making some menus unaccessable)

By "game-area" I mean the area the game itself is played in, without the menu on the left side of the screen. When the game is running at 1024x768, it's default width is 808px (0x328 in Hex).

Before it is possible to increase the game-width, it is necessary to adjust two values:

• Find 81 FF 00 04 00 00 at address 0x0002CEA0 and change the last four bytes to the width of your screen resolution (e.g. for 1680x1050 change to 81 FF 90 06 00 00)
• Find C7 05 0C 0F 73 00 00 04 00 00 at address 0x000C6EDD and change the last four bytes to the width of your screen resolution (e.g. for 1680x1050 change to C7 05 0C 0F 73 00 90 06 00 00)

Now we can change the width of the game-window:

• Find C7 05 18 0F 73 00 28 03 00 00 at address 0x000C6EF2 and change the last four bytes to your desired value (e.g. for the maximum width of 920px change to C7 05 18 0F 73 00 98 03 00 00)

By increasing the width too much, I got the following errors:



Further notes:

• I'm not sure why the width-limit of 1310px is there, but if you search s3.exe for 1E 05 00 00, you will find the value more than 30 times. Also some of these occurences are near the addresses that are listed in the crash-error-messages
• I won't try to fix the 1310px-limitation, until there is a way to increase the width that far, without decreasing the height.
• I still believe that the game does not allocate enough memory to display a bigger game window. I will keep digging, but to be honest, I don't even know where to look at the moment...

I'd like to change resolution for 1366x768 but I don't see the values in gfxengine,dll 00 03 ?? only 00 04 visible ?

I have exactly the same problem, only 00 04 visible.

interesting what you found out, but there any new news about chaning the screen / ingame resolution? On Settlers 4 there are working widescreen fixes to play the game in high resolutions and on 16:9 display with corect aspect ratio. I like settlers 3 and want to play it on my modern PC in a higher resolution or even with right 16:9 aspect ratio and not in old 4:3 ratio. so any fixes now out?

I am using the suggested Be.HexEditor program to modify The Settlers IV and none of the suggested strings to search for in gfxengine.dll can be found. I tried a Text search and a Hex search. I am copy/pasting the suggested strings in to the Search box.

I have the latest GOG version of the game for Windows.

Edit: It seems that the suggested strings should be provided without spaces between the numbers, to best facilitate copy/pasting. For example, copy/pasting 00 05 00 00 bb 00 04 00 00 results in no search results since the empty spaces are parsed as data. Instead you should copy/paste 00050000bb00040000 in to the bottom box in the Search UI.

There is no 00 03 in the highlighted code. Where am I supposed to input B0 04 for 1920x1080? Why is there no hex editing examples for changing the 1280x768 resolution mode so that we can have all the UI features?