Question

Overlays

Asked by: Kevin_R

Can anyone show me how to create a text overlay that will display over a full-screen directx capable game

Thanks in advance!

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Asked On
2005-07-11 at 06:50:07ID21487068
Tags

directx

,

overlay

Topic

DirectX Graphics & Game Programming

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: davebytesPosted on 2005-07-12 at 08:52:32ID: 14422643

Ummm.  Is this a game you are writing yourself already?  You just want to render some text at the end of each frame?  Or are you trying to render something over a retail/existing game's rendering?

 

by: Kevin_RPosted on 2005-07-12 at 08:54:13ID: 14422662

Rendering over another game

 

by: davebytesPosted on 2005-07-15 at 21:54:02ID: 14456431

I've looked back around... I'm sure I've seen examples before.  In some cases, people were putting replacement 'proxy' directx DLL in place of the real thing, and thus able to hook the Present call, and before passing along to the real directx they'd then make their own DX rendering calls.

From an old FRAPS readme:
>>>>
The first method is referred to as “API hooking”. Basically you want to obtain the address of the graphics function in memory, and patch this such that your code will get called whenever the game tries to use this function.

The other method is to write a “DLL wrapper”. Here you want to write your own DLL that exports the same functions as the graphics DLL. The idea is to rename the original DLL and put your DLL in its place. Then when your DLL is loaded, you proceed to load the original DLL and pass any function that is called through to it. Creating a DLL wrapper for DirectX is reasonably easy because there are only a few functions exported from the DLL. OpenGL however exports ALL of its API calls, which means that it can be very time consuming to build the stubs for all of the functions. If you want to pursue this method it may be easier to download and modify an existing OpenGL wrapper such as GLtrace.
<<<<

Some random stuff...

This site talks about win32 code hooking, various approaches:
http://help.madshi.net/madCodeHook.htm

This is a GTA speedometer hack, that apparently uses DX hooking:
http://spookie.powerpill.co.uk/speedo/

This guy did a bunch of hooking stuff around FF, and talks about process of hooking APIs:
http://ffxi.archbell.com/index.php?page=guides&guide=wrapping

A simplistic api hook example:
http://www.codeproject.com/dll/apihijack.asp

A page with tons of hack/cheat methodologies, including ptrs to articles on directx/d3d hooking:
http://pc.nanobot2k.org/?action=articles

... there's more.  I started with googling "directx api hooking"...

-d

 

by: MiKo93Posted on 2005-09-13 at 11:06:44ID: 14874277

In case you want to check out the proxy dll method, look here: http://www.proxy.mikoweb.de
miko

 

by: davebytesPosted on 2005-11-07 at 08:56:35ID: 15240393

Can this be closed as answered already? ;)

-d

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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