Overview
A step-by-step guide on how to remove black bars from this game on 16:10 screens.
The Problem
Life is Strange was one of the best games I’ve ever played and of course I really wanted to play Before the Storm but it took me a long time to get it because of lack of time to play.
As soon as I entered the game, I heard that beautiful soundtrack I was already quite excited, until the main menu appeared in the game and there were the famous black bars.
So far I was thinking, “Oh, just change the aspect ratio to 16:10, that’s okay!”. But then I saw a problem, there was no way to change the aspect ratio and worse, the game was in the maximum 16:9 resolution that my GPU could detect on my screen.
Then I thought of several conspiracy theories of resolutions and I came up with a solution that you can follow in this guide!
The Solution
The solution I thought was a very simple thing, I put together the knowledge I had about the control panel of my GPU with a brief knowledge about the Unity engine.
Basically we configured in the control panel of our GPU a custom resolution, with aspect ratio 16:9, the maximum that the monitor can arrive with that aspect ratio, that is, if its native resolution is 1440×900 (same as mine), the maximum of 16:9 resolution that you will achieve “natively” is 1440×810.
It may seem strange but the screen will work with its native resolution, but internally in the game it will be in a 16:9 resolution, ie the screen will “adapt” the native resolution to the custom resolution.
Then we simply pass an initialization parameter to the game forcing the internal resolution rendering mode.
Driver Settings
NOTES
- My GPU is from NVIDIA, maybe on Intel and AMD boards the way to set it up is different, but in the end it has the same essence.
- My system is in Brazilian Portuguese because I am Brazilian (how shocking), but the tutorial is written entirely in English and it is easy to understand the location of the settings. Sorry about that. 🙁
- Click on the images to view in original size.
1. First open the control panel of your GPU and go to the resolutions section.
2. Click on “Customize” to open the menu for creating custom resolutions.
3. Click on “Enable resolutions not exposed by the display” to tell the driver to accept a forced resolution on your screen.
4. Click on “Create Custom Resolution” to begin creating your custom resolution effectively.
5. Here we will define our highest resolution 16:9 for our screen, knowing this resolution is very simple.
- First we have to know our native resolution, in my case it is 1440×900, then we have to search for possible 16:9 resolutions up to our native resolution.
- After we have this data, let’s set the custom resolution, in “Horizontal pixels” we define the width and in “Vertical pixels” we define the height. You can also set the refresh rate here. In my case the highest possible 16:9 resolution is at 1440×810.
- I created a list with most of the 16:9 resolutions common to the current 16:10 monitors. This list contains the native resolution and just ahead of it we have the highest 16:9 resolution possible. Go to the “16:9 in 16:10 resolutions” section of this guide.
6. Click on “Test” to test the resolution created.
7. Click on “Yes” to save the resolution.
Your monitor will probably be set to custom resolution, here you can go back to your native resolution and you can already see the custom resolution in the control panel resolutions list.
So we finished the driver configuration of our GPU, now we will make the adjustments on Steam!
Steam Settings
In this section we will configure the parameters of startup of the game in Steam.
1. First right click on the game in the library and click on “Properties”.
2. In the window that has been opened, click “Set Launch Options” to continue.
3. In this window enter this command:
This will tell Unity that we want to force an exclusive fullscreen.
NOTE: If you do not add this parameter, the game will still have the black bars when we configure the custom resolution on it.
4. Click on “OK” to save your changes.
So here we finish the configuration of the parameters of initialization, now we go to the best part! Start playing without the black bars! 🙂
Game Settings
In this final section we’ll set up our game, the easy part!
This part is very simple. Probably your game will open in window mode, but do not worry!
What we should do is enter the video settings of the game, set our custom resolution and put the game in fullscreen.
Okay, so we’ll have the game in fullscreen without the black bars.
Goodbye black bars!
16:9 in 16:10 resolutions
This list contains the most common resolutions on the 16:10 monitors currently, although we can not easily find 4K 16:10 monitors to buy today, I decided to put it anyway.
Author Info
GitHub[github.com]
Guys, I hope the guide has been helpful to you.
Any problems report there in the comments or contact me that I will be trying to solve for you.
So that’s it, thanks and see you next time!