Discordians! The in-game overlay is 100% waiting for you, and it's time to incorporate your voice & text chat into your game for maximum effort, focus, and no distractions from declaring your online gaming supremacy. The overlay is a pretty fancy and fun piece of tech, so there are some important points to go over.

Let's get started

First steps first: Let's ensure the overlay enabled! 

A. Open up your User settings

B. Click the Overlay tab and enable in-game overlay

C. Click the Game Activity tab

D. Enable the overlay of the desired game.

Text Chat

Text Channels have made it to the Overlay! 

You’re now able to interact with a text channel in a very similar way you're already used to. Swapping between channels, generate invite links, emoji & reactions, it’s all there! Well, not all. There are a few missing features, guess we can call them Waluigi features. WAHHH. Some features that didn't make the cut are access pinned messages, jump to present messages, use file picker, and access to a search bar. 

Pinning

Have a constant eye on a text channel, and voice widget while you game thanks to pinning! Basically, this will allow parts of the overlay to still be visible while still playing the games you love.

To toggle if a widget is pinned or not, navigate to these options here

Customize the opacity with this option:

With a widget(s) pinned & the overlay hidden, it’ll look something like:

Note: when a channel has been pinned, you’ll be able to read live updates while you game; however, you won’t be able to respond or interact until you enable the overlay with the keybind.   

A new keybind has also been added for extra quickness! Navigate to User Settings > Keybinds & select Activate Overlay Chat to set your keybind.

An ingame preview mode has been added as well so you’re able to get it just right! Adjusting the widget automatically puts you in preview mode. This will give you an idea of what that’ll look like when you’re gaming. Clicking & holding these two areas will allow you to move & change the size of the widget.

Need more convincing of this heckin coolness? How does surviving the ARK while watching cute cat videos sound?

Resizing & Moving

Resizing and moving your chat window works how you’d expect it too! Click and hold here for all your resizing and moving needs.

Direct to your Friends

Your friends list has decided to join the party too! If you'd rather use a voice call instead of using a server, it's time to celebrate! From the Friends section, you'll be able to initiate, join, and leave voice calls.

Now that you'll start receiving voice calls, you're going to need a way to be alerted, without being taken out of that intense 2v2! We don't want to ruin that sweet sweet aerial.

Notifications in Overlay

Notifications have been added as well! There are a few types you should get familiar with. Keep in mind these notifications movable & removable, but we'll get to that later! 

Call Notifications 

Answer the call!

Text Notifications

Note, these notifications will mimic the text notification settings you already have set up. 

Open up the overlay to send that sassiness right back

Game Invite Notifications

Open the overlay to squad up!

Notification Options & Options in Overlay

You're able to customize where this notification pop-ups, or turn it off completely! These options can be found in User Settings > Overlay > Overlay Notifications.

To completely turn off these notifications select:

Heard you like to option when overlaying so we put one in your overlay! Options for overlay now exist in the overlay! With the overlay open, go ahead and click on the cogwheel: 

Here you'll be able to make adjustments to the overlay.  

Note, these options will only include the options for the overlay. Options in overlay won't include other options that you normally find in User Settings.

This is how you’re able to turn off notifications via overlay options. 

Super Important Note

At the moment, the overlay is some pretty intense tech with a bit of arcane magic going on under the hood. Unfortunately, our various Anti-Virus software buddies haven't quite finished prodding Discord's files for the 100% good to go. Long story short:

Enabling the overlay might get Discord flagged by your Anti-Virus software. This is ok! We can guarantee it is a false positive. We're working with all the different companies to get Discord whitelisted.

As you go into your software to add Discord to accepted processes, know that any file path that matches this one is 100% organic, certified, robograss-fed, homegrown Discord goodness:

%appdata%\discord\0.0.***highest-number***\modules

(the ***highest-number*** refers to the latest version of Discord. Your path will have different text here.)

You can whitelist files with that path with no problem.

Overlay Issues

As we work on the overlay, if you're experiencing issues with games crashing or ping spikes, we recommend you disable it temporarily.

To do this, follow the same steps you used to enable it. If you can't quite remember reading back that far, they are:

A. Open up your User settings

B. Click the games tab

C. Check the overlay box next to the problem game.

Want some extra credit?

We've really got our work cut out for us here. Luckily, you can help us out. 

If you do experience the overlay crashing a game, grab this log:

%appdata%\discord\0.0.***highest-number***\modules\discord_hook\hook 

And shoot us an email with dis.gd/contact.

Make sure you let us know what issue you ran into, and what game! It'll help us sort out the problem appropriately.

Problematic Games

There are some games that we know are going to have some issues when using the overlay. It's possible the overlay works as intended; however, it's an "overlay at your own risk" type of situation. These games are

Note, there are a few other cases that overlay will not work with. The overlay is currently not supported for Mac, games with Vulkan support, and generally old games.

See any improvements you’d like to see with overlay? Excellent! Best way to provide that feedback is here.