Is it possible to resize the UI in certain games?

[Niosai]

I don't know if this is possible, but if it was I'd assume it would require a cheat code or something. As a hypothetical, would I be able to reduce the size of the UI in Dissidia? Specifically the bottom portions like the HP bar and bravery bar? I'm sure it would break all kinds of things, but I feel as though just sizing it down by solid integers (X2, X4) seems like something that would be possible, yeah?

If so, does anyone have any knowledge and/or documentation on how I would go about doing this?

[LunaMoo]

It is possible and usually very easy since things like UI are often hardcoded and constant which normally is hard to find directly, but in case of texture locations you can use GEdebugger to find exactly at which coords UI textures are drawn, then find where game sets it. This can be done by tracking game code or by randomly changing such values via Cheat Engine, in the end you will want to trace the values in the game code anyway, so you'd have to learn mips assembly.

Alternative way is to use texture replacement, you can just replace original textures with ones where the sprites for UI elements are smaller, this will however not work too well if UI elements are made out of separate elemenents. For example HP bar might be 8 different elements connected side by side in which case you could still easily modify it's height, but you could not modify the lenght, otherwise it would end up with holes instead of a bar.

[Niosai]

I was on board until you mentioned learning MIPS Assembly. I don't know if that's worth going through the trouble for a small hobby mod haha but I do appreciate the guidance and I may look into it sometime.

[[Unknown]]

MIPS assembly is really nice and clean though, if you ignore the delay slots. It's a good one to learn if you're interested in learning assembly.

x86 Intel assembly is much more complicated and trickier to learn. ARM (likely used on your phone) is much less so, but still not as simple and clean as MIPS (although, it does not have delay slots...)

-[Unknown]

[LunaMoo]

Best way to learn assembly for limited use is exactly that, trying to do something, then just searching for what you don't understand. Definitely better than studying books blindly without looking at the real thing.

Depending on how the game works, it might be possible without learning mips, but there's a high chance your patch will have to constantly fight against the game which is bad and veeeery wasteful.
There's also another problem, with changing variables you risk that the game might store different data there where what you're patching does not exist, there's an example which I really like in Patapon 3 where someone created a cheat to write different reward chests, but those rewards are stored only on the rewards screen, and by luck the same location in memory is storing some pointers to savedata outside of that screen, so in result his cheat permanently breaks savedata. It's my favourite example not only because it's so extreme it permanently breaks stuff for player using it, but also because there's even some wiki site blaming hackers on ruining Patapon 3 multiplayer by intentionally breaking other people's savedata which is stupid as it's all about awfuly made cheat which was certainly not made in a way to intentionally break anything. It's also not even anti-cheat or anything alike, the game is just optimized well and reuses memory for many things, so cheats which patch variables at fixed location will never be safe there, there are many other games with similar problems just not as dramatic and pointers does not make that safe either as the same pointer can be reused for many things as well. Modifying code is always safest, althrough some generic functions can also be reused for many things, if you can't find more specific function you can still detect what you want to patch by register or memory values and filter out everything else.