Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Anniversary Edition

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Anniversary Edition

149 ratings
A better 16:9 widescreen fix.
By Izanami
This is a minor edit to the Dawn of War Widescreen Guide, all credit goes to Yorith, I changed some values in their guide. Inspiration comes from the 21:9 guide by Ghazzgul (who did a similar thing for 21:9 resolutions). Their guides are linked below.

Yorith's Original Guide:
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=205040803

Ghazzgul's 21:9 Guide:
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1132691115

The major change between this and the original guide is fixing the stretching that occurs on the game world, however this slightly worsens the issue with the minimap overlapping (however I tinkered with a few values with W40k.exe and W40kWA.exe to minimise this and I would still say it is acceptable) and a minor visual bug on the hub of the main menu.

WARNING - THIS GUIDE PROVIDES NO SOLUTIONS FOR NON-16:9 ASPECT RATIOS
5
4
   
Award
Favorite
Favorited
Unfavorite
Setting Your Resolution
First, ensure you are happy with your graphics options in Dawn of War itself as changing any graphics setting afterwards reverts the changes.

After you have done that, go to your Dawn of War directory and open "local.ini" with a text editor like Notepad or Notepad++.

Find "screenheight" (without inverted commas) and change the value to that of your vertical resolution (e.g. for 1920x1080 change it to 1080) of your 16:9 display.

Then find "screenwidth" (without inverted commas) and change the value to that of your horizontal resolution (e.g. for 1920x1080 change it to 1920) of your 16:9 display.

Changing Hex Values
You should then download a hex editor such as HxD https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/ and open the following files in it and replacing the values.

For "Platform.dll", "spDX9.dll" and "UserInterface.dll" - Open them in HxD, click search in the top bar, then replace and switch to the "Hex-values" tab and put ABAAAA3F in the "Search for:" box and then put 398EE33F in the "Replace with:" box and click "Replace all". Save the file and then move on to the next.

Once you have completed changing those hex-values, open "W40k.exe" and "W40kWA.exe" in a HxD as well. In both do the same as before but change the "Replace with:" value to 0000A03F.

Once this is done, you should be able to boot the game. If the main menu looks like below, this is normal and is a side-effect of the changes, outside this screen and the minimap the game works 100% as usual.

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2552636740
Farewell
Congratulations, Dawn of War should now run in widescreen with a few less visual annoyances!

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2552636770

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3250930749
60 Comments
xCc|Felt^CSM 31 Dec, 2024 @ 2:46pm 
I'am chaos | I am felt| I am building chaos marines.
xCc|Felt^CSM 31 Dec, 2024 @ 2:45pm 
Wide-screen not needed in future we use high vis lights to project images around the world.
arhum 12 Dec, 2024 @ 4:52am 
I see, It's a shame a game this popular hasn't had official nor unofficial widescreen support that extensively fixes all issues, sad. Thanks.
Izanami  [author] 12 Dec, 2024 @ 1:09am 
The cutscenes play out similarly to how they do in the later expansions which have native widescreen support:

The in-engine cutscenes aren't stretched, they're pretty letter-boxed though (horizontally and vertically).

Any pre-rendered cutscenes are stretched to roughly fill the screen (which is just the intro videos for the base game and perhaps some of the cutscenes in Winter Assault iirc).
arhum 11 Dec, 2024 @ 4:38pm 
How do the cutscenes play out with this tweak? are they stretched or bugged?
Izanami  [author] 11 Dec, 2024 @ 9:25am 
I don't know how the anti-cheat works but I wouldn't risk it seeing as you are modifying the game's executable.
Seu Mordomo (R.I.P.) 10 Dec, 2024 @ 12:58pm 
Will this get me banned in multiplayer?
Red Viper 24 Sep, 2024 @ 10:06am 
Brilliant! I can see again 😭
Izanami  [author] 23 Sep, 2024 @ 9:32am 
Try the files from this discussion (they're technically for Soulstorm, but should work so long as you put the .fnt files into [your install folder]/engine/locale/English/data/font

https://sp.zhabite.com/app/9450/discussions/0/792924952801763017/?ctp=3
Red Viper 23 Sep, 2024 @ 9:13am 
Thank you this worked out, one problem though, the text has become so small it's barely visible; is there a way to fix it?