As you may already know, in the Steam version of Phantom Brave PC there is was a bug that caused game settings to sometimes reset themselves to default values on launch.
There are several workarounds for this issue floating around, but none of them worked for me, so I made my own fix.


Try it out and see if it works for you, too!
This update from Durante:
https://cs2bus.com/games/409870/announcements/detail/4481737694941020390
fixed this, along with many other issues.

Since there is no source code for Phantom Brave PC available, I had to use debugger and poke around in the game executable to find a way to solve this problem.
Therefore, this fix involves patching the game's executable file to make it work correctly - that is, to load saved settings without them resetting to the default values.

You'll need to locate the folder containing the main executable "Phantom Brave PC.exe":

• Right-click the game in the Steam library
  
• Choose "Properties"
  
• Choose tab called "Local files"
  
• Click on the "Browse local files" button

With that in mind, all that is left is to choose which of the two ways you want to use to patch your game.
Why are there two ways of patching the game?
They give identical results, but differ in the amount of trust you need to have in order to apply them.

First one only requires you to download an already patched "Phantom Brave PC.exe" file and replace the one you have in that folder.

Second one is for those who do not trust random executables from the Internet (and rightly so).

Download the already patched version from here[www.dropbox.com], and put it in your Phantom Brave PC folder, replacing the existing file.

Please note, however, that you absolutely should not trust any executable that you got from the Internet.
I suggest using this way only if the manual way didn't work for you for some reason.

For the manual approach, we will need two things.

First is a patch file that I made with xdelta[github.com] - a free and open-source software for creating and applying binary patches. You can download the patch file here[www.dropbox.com].

Second is a software that will apply this xdelta patch to the Phantom Brave PC executable.
There are several tools that are capable of that, so I will link only the official one and the unofficial version with easy-to-use GUI that I have tried and confirmed to be working:

• xdelta (console application)[github.com]
  
• Delta Patcher (GUI)[github.com]

You need to choose either of those (or any other xdelta patcher in case you didn't like those two).

Extract the archive you have downloaded into the Phantom Brave PC folder and move the downloaded "patch.xdelta" file there as well.

Launch the "DeltaPatcherLite.exe", select the original "Phantom Brave PC.exe" and the "patch.xdelta" files and hit "Apply patch".
Now your game is patched and your settings should no longer reset to default values on startup.

Open a command prompt in the Phantom Brave PC folder.
To do so, type "cmd" in the Address Bar (as shown on the screenshot below) and press Enter.

Then, execute the following two commands in that command prompt (you can paste them by right-clicking in the terminal window and selecting "Paste") to apply the patch:
Last command assumes you have downloaded the 64bit version of the xdelta - if not, just change the executable name to the one you have extracted.
Now your game is patched and your settings should no longer reset to default values on startup.

Feel free to skip this section - it is not required in order to apply the patch.

If, however, you're curious about the inner workings of this patch, then please, do continue, but note that some degree of programming knowledge is required.


If we look at the function that handles the loading of saved values of game settings from "game.cfg" file (a file where the game stores its settings) through the debugger, we can see the following instructions:



The first two lines check whether "game.cfg" file is present at all.

The rest of the instructions compare different values from the loaded configuration file to the hardcoded constants and, in case they are equal, jump to another area of the code, skipping everything that actually loads the game settings into memory.

Later the game checks whether those loaded values are correct, but since it skipped the loading steps they obviously are not, and so it replaces them with default values.

This is where the problem lies.

Those hardcoded constants are perfectly sensible values for those options. The first 4 checks, for example, compare different sound volume sliders to their maximum value, 10. So if one of your volume sliders was maxed out, then the jump instruction triggers and the game doesn't load your settings, using the default ones instead.


We have the following situation:


And so - what should we do in order to force the game to always load the settings from game.cfg ?

That is - to execute green code path, instead of the red one?

We need to change how all those checks work so that they will never trigger again.

And so I replaced the constants in those checks, since it was the smallest and least invasive change that I could think of.

Since this new value is invalid for any of those options, and should never appear in the game.cfg file, the code that resets settings to default values will never get to run.


You can see this change for yourself by using any sort of binary diff software and comparing the original and patched executables:


As you can see, the only thing that was changed was the hardcoded value in all those checks.



That's all I had to say, thanks for reading and I hope that this fix will be useful to you.