What's up guys, welcome back once again
to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel. Look
at what we have here, the silver play
button arrived from YouTube for crossing
100,000 subscribers on the
Gaming Careers channel. I unboxed this
yesterday on stream so thanks very
much to everybody that came and watched.
"They got it right!"
But today's video, I'm going to be
talking to all of those streamers that
have a single monitor setup and
you still want to be interacting with
the chat, you still want to be having
that conversation with people, but you
don't want to be alt-tabbing the whole
time, you don't want to be reading it on
your phone when it's super small and you
don't want to have your game running in
a tiny resolution so that you can line
up your chat next to it. Well today I
have a solution for all of you and it is
a way of being able to have your chat
with transparency overlaid over your
game, so you can keep interacting with
chat and it works with Twitch, YouTube
Mixer and Facebook. All of that coming up
after a message from today's video sponsor.
BlueStacks 4 is an application that
allows you to play Android games on your
PC, now you obviously get a significant
performance improvement over a
traditional mobile device, but there's a
huge benefit here of it being much
easier to capture and stream these games
from OBS or Streamlabs OBS to a
platform like Twitch, YouTube or Mixer. If
you're interested in streaming mobile
games, creating content for mobile games,
or you just want to play mobile games on
your PC, then check out the link in the
description. So to get started with this
cool application that allows you to read
and interact with your Twitch app whilst
still playing in your game, we need to
head to Restream.io forward slash chat.
And I know what you're thinking, Pete
you've already done a video on Restream,
that website where you can
stream to 30 different platforms
simultaneously and yes you're right I
have, if you haven't seen that video you
can check out in the card up top, but
Restream have also built a chat
application that allows you to do this
cool thing with transparency and having
the window always remaining on top of
your game. So head over to Restream.io
forward slash chat, and we need to be
looking for this
link up here where it says "looking for
the desktop version of the program" and
you click desktop chat and it should
bring you to a page where you can then
download this software for Windows. So
exactly as you always do with your
downloads and installation, go through
the normal setup process and I will see
you as we launch the application. Next
what we're going to need to do is log
into our Restream account, so if you
don't already have one it's a super
simple free sign up and it allows you to
connect a few of your different
streaming accounts so Twitch or YouTube
or Mixer or multiple of these if you
want to, into Restream so that you can
then use this application to chat on
those platforms. So if you've got an
account log in if you don't sign up, it's
very easy. Once you've successfully
logged into the Restream platform you
should get this chat box here and this
is a chat window exactly the same as the
one that you have on Twitch or a Mixer
on YouTube. You can see up here I have
only connected my Twitch account and so
down here I can select to respond to
numerous chats, if I have numerous
platforms that I'm streaming to, but for
me I'm just going to stream to my Twitch so
I can respond directly to my Twitch
chat through this chat box. However the
thing is with live chat box is that it
can be hidden by other windows, so I can
quite easily alt-tab to a different
program and it still gets hidden behind
it and we want it to appear in front of
everything as well as on top of our
game. So for that we're going to need to
head into the settings, so you come up
here and click the little settings cog.
Now it'll take us to the accounts tab but
the one that we really care about is
called appearance. If we click across to
the appearance tab we can see some
options and the first option hopefully
super self-explanatory is window always on
top. So if I click this, this will mean
that the chat window is now always on
top and what I mean by that is I can go
to my google chrome tab and I could go
to the Gaming Careers website
or keep using google chrome or any other
application and my chat window is still
staying on top of that. Now that's all
good and useful but it is completely
blocking part of our screen, so you can
imagine if we had a game running and we
had our chat up in the top corner like
this, we would be not able to see the top
corner of our game. So we want to add
some transparency to this. So if we jump
back into the settings you can see the
next option is to enable transparency. If
we check that, we then get some options
down here so we can change the opacity
of our window. Now this is largely going
to be personal preference of
how much opacity you want and probably
depends on what game you're playing and
how light or how dark it is, but just for
now before we start playing around with
settings, I'll give you what I typically
use and that is to set the window opacity
all the way down to the minimum which is
1%, and then the message opacity which is
actually the messages that show on top
of our chat, I set that to around 30%. Now
that is instantly going to make it very
hard to see where our chat window is, if
you see me moving this blue bar you can
see part of the chat window still. So I'm
just going to set the window to maybe 20
percent or something, just whilst we
continue setting up the software and
then I'm going to drag that back down to 1%
when we are ready to actually use it. So
what other options do we still have here,
use GPU, I don't recommend using that
neither do Restream by the looks of it.
Showing taskbar just means that the
application is going to show in the taskbar.
Show view count that just shows a view
count of how many people are watching
your stream at the top of the chat
window which is a useful little tidbit
of information that you can have still
whilst you are playing your game. Now
click-through mode, this is a useful
option that basically means that you can
still interact with the chat window if
you hold down the hotkey. The hotkey by
default is set to control, if in your
game you're going to be using control then
it's worth setting this to something
else. If I enable this option
I can show you exactly how to use it. So
if I hold down control I can now click
this "got it" button and I can drag this
window around and I can type
back into my chat or whatever, but if I
let go of control I can't interact with
it anymore, I can't interact with that
chat window. So if hold on control I can
move it, let's move up to the top corner
which is probably where we're going to have
it. If I let go of control and try and
move it I'm actually moving my window,
the browser behind it. So a useful option
to be able to interact directly with the
chat window. The last couple of options,
URL display, this just means that it's
going to replace any URLs in your chat with
tiny URL which is useful because you
don't want loads and loads of text
filling up your screen. So enable that if
you wish to and finally you have some
options for font sizes of the message,
the person that's chatting their
nickname, as well as if you want a
timestamp or not. I'm going to leave those
at their default and I'm going to turn this
right back down to 1% which is going to
look like it's completely disappeared,
but it is still there and once I get
some chat in there, you're going to see
exactly how it's going to
look for our game. So if we now close
down these settings and we head across
to our Twitch chat and just type in an
example message, let's say "hello world".
You can now see that comes up and it's
difficult to see because it's overlaid
over so many different colors, but that
has come up in our Twitch Chat overlay. If I
open a new tab, it's probably going to be a
little bit easier to see, so there you
can see the 1% opacity of the actual
chat window and the
30% opacity of each message. Now this
might need to be turned up a little bit,
but it is quite difficult to see on such
a light background. Once we go to a
darker background such as in a game,
hopefully it's going to be easier to see. So
let's start up a game now. So here I am
in Overwatch or any example
game and you can see that right now my
Twitch chat isn't showing in the top
corner, and that is because I have the
game running in full-screen mode and to
be able to use this program you need to
be running your game in windowed or
borderless window. So it can still take
up the full screen, but it needs to be
running in one of those options
otherwise you need to have some complex
coding to do with Direct X and
it gets very difficult. So if we come up
to find your options in the game that
you're playing, the video options and
you'll usually have this display mode
near the top. I'm going to go to borderless
window, so I'm still going to be running
fullscreen but it's going to be running in
a window. So if I press ENTER to restart
the game you can now see that I have my
chat appearing in the top and I can
interact with this chat. It's quite
difficult because it's overlaid with the
settings up in the top, if I
press control I can now type back
"hello back to you" and you can see it
comes up in the chat there. So maybe 30%
was a little bit too low, I probably
would go back and tweak that so the
messages are appearing a little bit
darker, maybe 50 percent or something
like that, so let's go back to our
Restream chat settings and up that to 50
percent. So I just quit the
game and then I realized that you can
actually do this whilst the game is
still running because of course, if you
hold down control or whatever hotkey we
had set you can click the option
settings still. So if you hold down
whatever your hotkey was, click the
settings cog, you can bring up the
options and you can change the
transparency from here, so let's just up
the message transparency from 30% to 50%
and see how that looks and that is a lot
more legible and of course you can play
around if you would like to show the
window a bit as well with some
transparency you can change that here as
well.
I prefer that actually to be completely
off and then just have the messages
showing up as an overlay and as you can
see there you have Twitch chat whilst
playing a game in full screen. Yes you are
playing borderless or borderless window
but you're still playing using your full
screen on a single monitor. You can reply
directly if you just use your hotkey,
type into the chat box what you want to
type back. You can read all your comments
as they come in live from Twitch.
Hopefully you have found that video
helpful, you now should have your Twitch
chat or your YouTube chat, Mixer chat,
whatever streaming platform you have,
overlaid on top of your game where you
can drag it where you want. You can size
things how you want, you can change the
opacity so it really works for the game
and how you want to interact with your
chat. Make sure that you can read it
obviously but also make sure it's not
too distracting so you can still perform
the best that you can whilst playing the
game. Hopefully that video has been
helpful, if it has please do give us a
thumbs up on the YouTube video that
really does help us out and obviously if
you haven't yet subscribed to the
YouTube channel please look around at
the massive amount of tutorials that we
have been producing for live-streaming
and for content creation within the
gaming niche. As always a huge thank you
to my patrons this month, who have helped
support
the Gaming Careers YouTube channel and
helped support the creation of videos
like this for the greater Gaming
Careers community.
Again, thank you to everybody that
subscribed over the last year and a half, an
absolute unbelievable achievement to hit
a hundred thousand subscribers in less
than two years and I thank every single
one of you for helping make this my
dream job.
Hopefully I'm helping you guys along the
way as well and subscribers I will see
you in the next video. Peace!
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