How to proper windowed without black bars or cut off ingame elements?

Hello World,

I’ve had this problem since the begining of switching to Linux and it’s finally pissed me off enough that I’m ready to tackle it.

Basically whenever I play a game in windowed mode parts of the game get cut off as you can see in the pick below with the “back” and “continue” buttons.

Or in Zoeti where the UI elements seem properly positioned, but if there are more then 3 enemies in a battle the forth one will be offscreen…

And it doesn’t matter which type of windowed either, if it’s the type where you go in the games options, select windowed, and then select a resolution for that window, or if it’s like in Songs of Silence where you can just drag&drop to resize the game window to your liking.

So I started playing around with the settings in Lutris and it seems if I enable gamescope I can get the game elements to actually stay inside the window, but it adds these ugly black bars when I resize it!!!.. :sob:

From looking at gamescope --help it seems maybe the upscaler options might help me fix that? But it doesn’t tell me how to use them, and simply adding -S fit or -S fill in the Custom Settings dialog box didn’t work. :pleading_face:
Do I have to use “” somewhere or some other kid of symbols or how the heck do I use these settings?

Or am I on the wrong track altogether? :worried:

Please help, thank you.

This obviously shouldn’t happen using default settings, neither with nor without gamescope. Some questions:

  • Does it also happen for example in games started directly through Steam, or native games (e.g. Beyond All Reason, 0 A.D. from the Software Store / Repo?
  • How is gamescope’s behaviour if you specify the games’ resolution as well as output resolution?

In my experience gamescope likes to open with a maximized window, causing black bars. grabbing it with the cursor causes it to snap to its defined default size, removing those bars.

Also please post the output of inxi -GMS so we get an idea of your system.

Thank you very much for replying.

  • I’ve tried Beyond All Reason and indeed that one behaves properly, no matter how I resize it no black bars either in the menus or ingame.

  • Sadly setting those resolutions for gamescope did nothing in either Songs Of Silence or Zoeti, black bars still there. :frowning:

Here’s the inxi output(not really sure why it says 1969x1108 resolution when my monitor and system settings are set to 2560x1440 but hey…) let me know if you need anything else.

not really sure why it says 1969x1108 resolution when my monitor and system settings are set to 2560x1440 but hey…

That’s a strong clue. Do you happen to have Fractional Scaling or some “Zoom” factor enabled in your system settings? Should be around the display settings in KDE.

If so set it back to off / 100% and try those games again.

Well yeah, I have the scale set to 130% as everything is entirely too small for me otherwise…

Anyway I tried to set the scale to 100%(just to test cause it’s really impossible for me to keep it at that level) and like that setting the max and output resolutions in gamescope does work. But as soon as I try to resize the window with drag&drop the black bars still appear… :sob:

Did you also try it without gamescope, to rule out bugs with that one?

I tried to replicate the bug by changing scaling, however on my system (OpenSuse + Wayland + GNOME) it seems to work fine.
You might also want to try changing that “Legacy applications (X11)” scaling setting seen in the screenshot above.

Yeah when I had it at 100% I tried Songs Of Silence without gamescope too and same issue, no more black bars but certain elements don’t scale properly aka they get cut off or whatever the hell happens to them, like I showed in the first screenshot.

And with both scale at 100 and selecting “scaled by the system” no change in either game with or without gamescope, at least no change for the better. At one point Songs Of Silence looked arguably worse as it added some small black bars on the Y axis too as you can see in the pic below, loool…

So what’s next? :worried:

Hello, I tried to reproduce your issue, I installed this game using GOG installer and Lutris “+” “install a Windows game from an exe”, nothing more.
My resolution is 1920x1024:

No black borders.
I do not use gamescope, just Lutris default options, I didn’t change game options neither.

Well you have to change the game options in order to try and reproduce, you have to set it to windowed and then play around with the window and resize it.

Here’s a short video(just ignore if it asks you to register, skip that step and it should take you straight to the video) so you can see everything exactly, maybe I am not explaining it right…

I don’t understand why you need to play this game in windowed mode?
Did you try to specify Gamescope resolution?

I usually play most 2d games(unless it’s something more involved/atmospheric like the Trine series, or Little Nightmares, or Duke Nukem Manhattan Project) in windowed mode while doing other things like watching youtube videos or movies/shows, etc. at the same time.
I’ve been doing it since forever and I’d very much like to keep doing it… :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Yes, I detailed the problems with that above. But even if somehow I could get only that to work with my other settings I’d still very much like to be able to resize the window to my liking AT LEAST in games which support such action natively, like Songs Of Silence.

Would you mind installing another desktop environment like Gnome and test it there? By now I think this might be a desktop compositor or window manager issue (programs part of the pipeline to manage and draw your graphical desktop), given you can manipulate the buggy part by changing fractional scaling and stuff.

you can do so on EndeavourOS with using the eos-packagelist (taken from here).

eos-packagelist --help
eos-packagelist --list
eos-packagelist profile Gnome-Desktop --install

Unfortunately I’m not familiar enough with EndeavourOS to tell you the next steps. Technically you should then be able to start a Gnome session upon login.

Another inxi -G read after starting Gnome would also be useful to make sure it then runs a different compositor etc.

If it runs fine with Gnome this bug has to be elevated to the KDE bugtrackers.

Hmmmm, I was afraid it would come to this… According to what I remember reading on the EOS forums running 2 desktop enviroments at the same time can be… “problematic”.
But ok, I’ll do some research and see how/what I can do. I’ll report back once the testing is done, thanks you.

SIGH, I tried both Fluxbox and gnome, they behaved the same in both of them… :sob: :sob: :sob:

Any further ideas pretty please?