Hephaistos

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4659919/131267791-5e71f0e0-4496-4bf1-bc55-ab5e98eccc9a.mp4

CLI tool for patching any resolution in Supergiant Games' Hades, primarily targeting ultrawide monitors (21:9, 32:9), multi-monitor (48:9), and Steam Deck (16:10).

By default, on Hades:

• Resolutions wider than 16:9 (e.g. 21:9) are pillarboxed with artwork / black bars on left / right.
• Resolutions taller than 16:9 (e.g. 16:10) are letterboxed with black bars on top / bottom.

Hephaistos can bypass both, and also allows using custom resolutions (useful for custom window sizes and multi-monitor without Eyefinity / Surround).

Hephaistos is stable: many users have been using it for a long time, some even from their very first time on Hades, and nothing major has had to be fixed for a while. Still, there might be rare quirks on specific setups that haven't been detected yet: you are most welcome to report anything by opening a new issue (ideally with screenshots / videos / a save file) and I will definitely have a look and fix it 👌

(Click on items to show details. For example, click on Install for installation instructions.)

<details> <summary><h1>Issues / FAQ</h1></summary>

(Click on items to show details)

<details> <summary><h3>Black / empty bars on the main menu and other menus in game (e.g. Mirror of Night)</h3></summary>

Short answer: Hephaistos cannot resize static assets such as animations / FMVs (e.g. main menu) and most on-screen artwork (e.g. in-game menus, dialogues): they will stay at 16:9 in the center of the screen.

Longer answer: These static assets were designed by Supergiant Games with the assumption of a 1920x1080 viewport. If Hephaistos were to resize them to fit the screen, they would either have to be distorted (which would be very ugly) or cut (which loses information and would not work for menus anyway, because there are often buttons on the edges that would be cut). Instead, Hephaistos simply centers them, which is why black bars or empty bars are displayed: Hephaistos cannot "invent" something to display instead 😉

There is one exception to the rule: fullscreen overlays (e.g. red flash when getting hit, dialogue dimming) are resized to fit the whole screen instead of being kept in the center. This is done because fullscreen overlays can be stretched without visual artifacts.

Also of note: there are a few assets that actually extend beyond 1920x1080, so these extra bits will now be displayed since the artwork is centered (e.g. Chaos dialogue, Pact of Punishment menu). This was impossible to tell from the original game (since it was cut at 1920x1080), so you are in fact getting a bit more of Hades artwork when using Hephaistos 😁

</details> <details> <summary><h3><code>Windows protected your PC</code> popup when trying to run Hephaistos</h3></summary>

Windows SmartScreen is being extra paranoid because Hephaistos is not an EV-signed executable (this costs money). To run Hephaistos, click on More info in the center of the screen and then Run anyway.

Note: if you are a power user, you may want to disable Windows SmartScreen altogether (Reputation-based protection settings > turn Potentially unwanted app blocking off).

</details> <details> <summary><h3>Antivirus software says Hephaistos is a virus</h3></summary>

This is a false positive due to Hephaistos containing hex editing code (required for patching Hades' executables) and using PyInstaller for packaging. It is common for hex-editing PyInstaller-based programs to get falsely detected by AV software and there is nothing I can do about it (see here).

All I can do is tell you that if you downloaded Hephaistos from this GitHub repository, you are safe to run it (the Windows build is automatically bundled with PyInstaller and directly uploaded to GitHub by GitHub runners themselves, there is very little chance it was tampered with in any way). If you don't want to trust hephaistos.exe, I would recommend reading the source code and using the Python version yourself.

Another solution I would suggest is to remove your antivirus software and stick with the default Windows Defender antivirus. Unlike in ancient times, Windows does a good job at protecting users nowadays, and it also seems not to falsely detect hephaistos.exe as a virus (well, at least in most cases). This will also boost your PC performance because third party AV software is very bad for performance (and there is nothing you can do about it).

</details> <details> <summary><h3>I thought Supergiant Games said ultrawide was not possible. Why did they lie?</h3></summary>

This is what Supergiant Games said (source):

Hades is a 2D game and many aspects of it are built around the 16:9 aspect ratio. We cannot just extend the game viewport to ultrawide resolution without introducing a wide variety of problems.

Short answer: Personally, I don't think SGG was lying. I've seen the "wide variety of problems" they are talking about, and I believe they said this because of technical debt in their tool chain that'd be impossible for them address properly in a timely manner (it would cost too much).

Longer answer: There were definitely a lot of things of fix, this mod was more involved than the typical ultrawide fix mod. The vast majority of ultrawide fixes are for 3D games where one only needs to remove intentional limitations on viewport / aspect ratio with a hex patch (example: Horizon Zero Dawn), hence why generic solutions such as SUWSF are very useful. In Hades' case, the UI is very, very elaborate (many different menus, each with their own on-screen artworks and interactions), hence an ad-hoc solution dynamically re-adjusting UI elements was required, resulting in a tremendous amount of additional custom work so that individual UI elements are properly positioned after resizing the viewport.

I can see why SGG would not want to invest in supporting this in an official capacity. As a modder if something's not working perfectly well in the modded resolution I can just say "eh, whatever", whereas a less-than-perfect implementation from SGG might be considered botched by users (and rightfully so: if you state you are supporting a resolution, then of course users will expect it to be supported).

After reverse engineering the thing, it seems to me their UI / UX tool stack (e.g. whatever the artists / designers use to create the HUD) would need a huge refactoring to allow for proper support of arbitrary aspect ratios. Deriving from the fixes I had to do, I'm 99% sure the 16:9 limitation actually exists solely due to how their custom in-house tools happened to evolve over the years (they have been reusing stuff since Bastion), and the fact all their games are limited in a similar way is just a byproduct of this (it's basically technical debt). Assuming they did address it, then on top of that they'd have to have people that actually do test arbitrary aspect ratios, and think about how to handle every edge case, etc.

From a business perspective, it's a trade off between the investment required for such a small user base vs. the need / want to gain respect from this small user base, and I'm not blaming SGG for not doing it considering their resources: it's not a huge AAA, this type of complex technical debt is not free to address (it's actually very costly), and at some point business decisions need to be made.

Also, remember that they stopped active development work on Hades a long while ago. We can always hope that at some point they'll be able to address this technical debt and have their next games support ultrawide officially...! 🤞

</details> <details> <summary><h3>Can I get banned for using Hephaistos?</h3></summary>

No. Hades is an offline game and is not tamper-protected on any platform (e.g. no VAC on Steam): you will not get banned.

</details> <details> <summary><h3>Do achievements still work when using Hephaistos?</h3></summary>

Short answer: Yes. Hades uses client-side achievements (i.e. achievements are managed by the game, not by Steam / Epic Games / Microsoft Store) and Hephaistos does not touch anything achievements-related: achievements still work exactly like in the original game.

Longer answer: No matter the platform (Steam, Epic Games, Microsoft Store), achievements can be of 2 types: client (offline checks) or server (online checks).

Client achievements are most common. In this mode, achievements are handled client-side (i.e. by the game), offline. There is no check or anything done by the platform: the client sends a message saying "unlock X achievement on Y game" and platform says "sure". This is why you can use Steam Achievement Manager to unlock (and even relock) any client achievement