Mainly due to its clean interface and user-friendly in-game overplay, discord has become the voice chat app for PC gaming. You can keep your focus on the game and minimize distractions by enabling and customizing your own game overlay.
What Is Discord's In-Game Overlay?
In Discord, the overlay is the graphical layer that can be added to some of the games so that you can interact on Discord and play the game simultaneously. You can use the Discord overlay, to follow chat topics, see the incoming calls or notifications as you play the game, even on a single monitor. Most of the AAA titles have some support for the Discord overlay, but it doesn't work with all the games.
Essentially, you can use the Discord Overlay for messaging and voice chatting as you are playing a game.
It is very simple to use while in the middle of gaming as it can be opened and closed at any point.
You can use it while you are playing a game with your friends so that you can coordinate and chat easily while you play. Also, if you are planning to stream your gameplay, it's going to be really useful for you. You can manage it while you are in the game.
This feature is made very easy and customizable for your comfort. You can make the overlay invisible, or make it show up over your game or even have it just for the selected games.
Enabling Discord’s In-Game Overlay
- You could enable the Discord game overlay by going to Settings by clicking on the cog icon which will be right next to your name and avatar near the bottom corner of the window.
- Open the "Overlay" tab under App Settings, and click on the toggle next to "Enable In-Game Overlay."
- You can lock the overlay by default by pressing Shift + ' ( that is the key next to the Tab key on your keyboard).
- This setting could be changed by clicking on the keyboard icon and pressing a new key combination.
How to Customize Discord’s Game Overlay
The size of the avatars can be changed or you could choose when names and users are displayed using the settings in this menu.
- You can find the Notification Position down at the bottom of the Overlay menu. Then depending on where you will like the overlay to appear, you can click on one of the four grey corners of the screen.
- Then disable the overlay notifications by clicking on the circle-backlash icon in the middle.
- To show text notifications as well as the usual voice notifications you can click the toggle at the bottom of the menu.
- You could open the Settings menu and select the "Game Activity" tab to enable or disable the Discord game overlay for specific games.
- To turn the overlay on or off just click on the monitor icon on the right of a game.
- These settings could be adjusted while in-game. You could press Shift + ' and then click the cog icon to bring up the in-game overlay menu.
Pinning Windows to Discord’s Game Overlay
You can pin a text chat window over your game, once your overlay is up and running. You could just launch the game and press Shit + ' ( if you chose that previously) and bring up the in-game overlay menu. Even when you lower the in-game overlay menu you could just click the pin icon to make the window appear. You can click the Opacity icon and adjust the slider for adjusting the opacity of this window.
All the settings that gamers want from a VoIP app are provided by discord, you just need to make sure that your overlay is very clean and unintrusive, and also show all the information you need to keep up with your team.
