Visibility Jam. July 19-21, 2024. See the results.
An overlay GUI used for personal or streaming purposes. Featuring transparent windows, streamable games, productivity tools, and more

About Project Overlay


Meet Project Overlay: an overlay GUI that can be used for personal or streaming purposes. Featuring (at some point) transparent windows, stream interactivity, interactive games, productivity tools, and more.

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Last update for the jam: I've added in a text area that captures contents from a todo list txt file, and saves edits to that same file. Usable across streams or work sessions - will save me typing up to dos every time I stream.

To add: I'm keeping a log of the features I'm adding to the project on my youtube channel - the latest video is here:
https://youtu.be/Ot1ySSe5bjs

So, I finally added in the feature that will hopefully make this application somewhat of a reinvention: camera video capture!

The point of this application is for someone streaming to be able to see what the "viewers" see, but on their own desktop while they work away. The "reinvention" here is to make the process of setting up the UI for the stream overlay to be as effortless and intuitive as possible, retaining as many (and more) features that you get out the box in typical streaming software. I don't think this will suit everyone, but I certainly appreciate it (hence why I'm making this program). It's a similar situation to how screen-sharing works in other apps, but with a streaming twist.

And as mentioned, the addition of camera capture gives us a big step up on recreating what you get out of current video capture software. It took me a while to figure out how to get the camera video stream using the Win32 API. And as I'm programming in C, its been a real experience grappling with COM too. That is meeting my big personal takeaway from this project: to really deep dive into the Win32 and figure out what's achievable in it.

And so ends my submission for the Wheel Reinvention 2022 jam so far. Unfortunately the project is not yet in a state for any kind of release: for starters, the camera capture will almost certainly instantly crash the application on any other computer... magic numbers abound! But this will be a long term project (I'm giving myself 2 years on this one...?!? famous last words), so let's see what we can do with it.