How to do fancy messages?
Matthew moments here to teach you about custom stream overlay tips and tricks.
My stream overlay is a custom software made in unity. It uses the twitch API to receive chat messages. Displays them using text mesh pro in unity and I use windows text to speech to read your messages out loud.
Command types
There are three different kinds of ‘commands’.
- Custom commands
- Text to speech commands
- Rich Text commands
Custom commands and functionality
Commands
Custom commands are usually context sensitive. They are prefixed with an underscore and will be named in the title of the stream when they are active.
For example a fan favourite command: _snark
that let players spawn a bunch of pesky bug-like creatures named snarks (pictured above) on top of me during my playthrough of half life.
A notable exception to this rule is _shutup which is always active and lets you interrupt someone else’s text to speech readout. Please feel free to use this whenever there are shady promotion bots in the chat.
Emoji
The overlay currently does not support emoji. The emoji will instead be displayed as this icon:
When a message consists only of emoji the software will play a sound clip saying “gaming”. (currently due to a programming bug it only works when the message is just a single emoji.)
Text to speech commands
Text to speech commands modify how the text to speech pronounces your message. You can find a full list of the available commands and their documentation here.
Text mesh pro commands
Text mesh pro commands modify how the text of your message is displayed. You can find a full list of the available commands and their documentation here.
Examples;
- Big loud gaming: <emph><size=500%><mspace=1em>GAMING</mspace></size></emph>
- Rainbow: <color=#FF0000>R</color><color=#FF7F00>A</color><color=#FFFF00>I</color><color=#00FF00>N</color><color=#0000FF>B</color><color=#6A0DAD>O</color><color=#8B00FF>W</color>
- Hidden message: <size=0><color=#00000000>hide this text
- The language of my people: I will now speak the language of my people... <size=0><voice required="Gender=Female"><voice required="Age!=Child"><pitch middle="100"><rate absspeed="100"> <color=#fa87c2></size> nya mrrp meow mrrp nya mrrp meow owowo meow purr hiss mew chirp grrr yowl mrow meep nyan purrr hisss mew mrrr nya raow!
- japanese: <voice required="Language=411"> なんであなた英語喋っとるん？</voice>