making an overlay
I want to make my own overlay, just like xbox gamebar or that geforce experience thing where you can broadcast, etc. I dont want to tab out of my games when I just need media controls to skip a song. I want it to be similiar to the ALT + R thing from geforce experience where you get an overlay, that shows you info. How should I do this? I’d like it to be a system tray thing that toggles the gui on keypress. Should I do this with basic .NET C# in visual studio to make the gui and make it system tray thing somehow or should I do something else to build the ui?
24 Replies
https://github.com/michel-pi/GameOverlay.Net is an excellent startingpoint
Looks good, but I’d like it to be interactive
so make it interactive?
I only read “click-through”
you can disable that iirc
Ah okay then
Awesome
take the example code, make it run, try to make some clickies work
seems like a good starting point
Ill try this evening
if that doesnt work, maybe look at https://github.com/lolp1/Overlay.NET
I dont know if I want to work with libraries
I thought I would do it with bare .NET and C#
uhh
Would that be worse?
yes
so, in order to render things "on top" of an exclusive full screen game, like the steam or geforce experience overlays do...
you need to do some tricky stuff with directx
Oh
I dont think im at the point where I can fool around with directx yet
this is very much non-trivial code for a beginner, and if you truly want "no libraries" you cant even use SharpDX or similar direct x libs
so you'll have to interface with native directx apis yourself 😄
tldr: dont be afraid of using libraries
Im not afraid but I want to go deep in C# and libraries are premade stuff
You can make it with a library first, then check the source code of the library to see how it works
then remake it without the library
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess thats the best way
Realistictly, you won't be able to do this using strictly only the base class library of .NET
it simply doesnt have the bindings required to do something like this
if you just want a desktop app that you can tab into, thats a different story
No
Thats the point
Tabbing out often “lags” games
yep
I always do borderless window if I can but some only got fullscreen
And in far cry 4 for example I wasnt even able to get the windows menu with the win-key or esc+ctrl, I had to use alt+tab and even when I did that it was laggy and weird
Ive looked at the source code and it seems relatively easy
Ive made a sketch in adobe illustrator of how I want it to be
Everything will be rounded as hell