An overlay your capture software can actually record, and packs that arrive with the author's instructions
The overlay recorded as a solid black rectangle for a lot of people, and nothing on the Overlay page could fix it: the window that draws over a game has to be transparent, and Windows composites a transparent window in a way OBS's default capture method cannot read. Capture mode is now its own separate window, opaque and in the taskbar, that every capture method records correctly. Alongside it, a game pack can now carry the author's own instructions and screenshots, written in a block editor inside the app and shown both on the pack's page here and in the app's import preview before anything is applied. This release also removes a behaviour: auto sprint no longer engages while your keyboard is driving the movement stick, because a keyboard cannot make a threshold gesture and it was holding L3 down for the whole time you were moving. Behind those sits a third pass over Drive a Controller, including an engine clock that had every timing window in the product running about 40 percent long and an aim down sights key that did nothing at all at the settings it ships with.
Highlights
- Capture mode is now its own overlay window: opaque, decorated, draggable and in the taskbar. Point OBS at it with any capture method, including the default one, and it records what you see. Tick Client Area to drop the title bar.
- A game pack can carry the author's own instructions and screenshots. They show on the pack's page on this site, and in the app's import preview above the list of what the pack will change, because that is the part that tells you whether you want it.
- Write them in the app: headings, paragraphs, numbered steps, notes and up to eight images, with a live preview drawn by the same renderer an importer sees.
- A new Your shared packs card lists everything you have published, so an instruction you got wrong can be corrected later rather than only in the moment you publish.
- The Drive a Controller bindings page now says the thing that had been costing support the most time: your game sees a controller, so it uses its controller layout and its controller settings tab. In Call of Duty, Use and Reload share one button and are told apart by how long you hold it.
- A new Copy pad trace button sits beside the diagnostic on the Drive page. It records what the virtual pad actually sent, coalesced so one export covers minutes of play rather than four seconds. Controller output only: no keystrokes, and no window or process names.
- Any single row of Drive bindings can be put back to its shipped key. That matters most for Escape, which is bound to Options by default and which the key capture treats as cancel, so clearing it used to mean starting the whole set again.
- Pressing the Drive hotkey is local and instant when your session is already running, instead of two server round trips before the mouse starts aiming again.
- The Play Mode card now states its cost: while it is open your game is not the focused window, and some games slow down or pause when they are not in front.
- The status strip on the Drive page stops claiming your keyboard and mouse are driving the controller when something is quietly blocking them, and the setting that does the blocking can now be turned off from that page.
- Turning on the virtual controller from the Drive page now installs ViGEmBus if it is missing, instead of failing with an error that named a card on a different page.
Fixes
- The overlay recorded as a solid black rectangle in OBS. It looked perfectly correct on your own screen, and no setting in OmniControl could change it.
- With chroma key on, the watermark vanished from the recording while looking fine in the app, and thin text went with it below 87 percent opacity. On a free licence the watermark is what the feature is traded for, so this was a clean overlay without Pro.
- Resetting the overlay's layout dropped you out of capture mode and discarded the position you had placed the window at. The window stayed on screen and stopped drawing, so the OBS source went to a blank dark rectangle while nothing was drawn over the game either.
- In capture mode a launching game put the transparent game overlay on screen instead of yours, so the window your scene was pointed at stayed dark. The capture window could also freeze, because the live input stream it draws from was being switched off underneath it.
- A key bound to aim down sights did nothing at the settings the app ships with. Scope sensitivity starts at 100 percent and your aim only slows below 100 percent, so the card said the key was working while nothing changed.
- A 250ms hold took roughly 350ms, a 300ms double tap roughly 430ms, and turbo set to 10 pulses a second fired about 7. Every timing window in the engine was running about 40 percent long.
- A turbo key could swallow the start of a press, up to 50ms at the default rate, which on a fire key is a shot you pressed for and never got.
- Importing a game pack could replace your entire Drive a Controller setup with the shipped defaults, including when you unticked Keyboard and Mouse specifically to protect it. A pack that set nothing but a sensitivity reset every binding you had.
- A shared pack could install a binding that cannot reach a virtual controller, and the whole Drive page then went read-only - every slider snapped back with an error naming a button you never bound and could not see.
- Turning Drive on could report "Could not switch Drive a controller" for a virtual pad that was about to succeed. It gave up after a flat half second, and building a pad legitimately takes longer while devices are enumerating.
- One failed background call left the whole Drive page blank, with no message and nothing to press. It now draws what did load, names what did not, and offers a retry.
- The Emulation input dropdown reverted to Auto-detect after every Drive session, including sessions you never started, since a launching game can activate a profile that carries Drive off.
- One packet from a graphics tablet, a KVM, a remote session or a virtual machine stopped your real mouse aiming for the rest of the session, with no way back except restarting the app.
- ADS stuck off, or firing stopped mid fight. A mouse button held through a stall or a mouse hotplug could not come back until you released it and pressed it again.
- Taps went missing two ways: a key tapped in the game and then an alt-tab into OmniControl lost the press, and so did a tap made during the three quarters of a second the virtual pad takes to rebuild after a driver blip, which also left a Toggle binding inverted for the rest of the session.
- Toggle was lost two more ways. Re-binding a key on the Drive page silently reverted that row from Toggle or Turbo back to plain Hold, including when you pressed the same key again just to check it had registered, and a touchpad swipe set to Toggle fired once and then never again.
- A Rotation set in Stick Studio turned a level mouse flick, or a level gyro pan, into one that climbed or dipped.
- With F8 set as your Drive hotkey, starting a calibration wizard also turned Drive off, and the wizard then told you the camera barely moved. F8 is now refused as a hotkey.
- An invisible full-screen window sat over every game the entire time OmniControl was running. It is now a small corner panel, parked off screen unless a notification is actually on it.
- Macro playback spun the processor for the last two milliseconds of every step, measured at 13 to 20 percent of a core while a hold-repeat recoil macro was firing.
- Removing your own devices was capped at six in thirty days, which turned the page for freeing a slot into a second lock-out. It is now an hourly limit instead.
- Pack screenshots outlived the packs they belonged to. A deleted account's images kept serving at their URLs forever, so did the images on a pack we had taken down, and a screenshot you uploaded and then removed still counted against your eight.
The overlay that recorded as a black rectangle
People pointed OBS at the overlay and got solid black. It looked correct on their own screen, every setting on the Overlay page was right, and nothing in the app could change it.
The overlay that draws over a game has to be transparent and click-through, or it would swallow your shots. On Windows, a transparent window is composited by the desktop rather than drawn plainly, and OBS's older BitBlt capture path cannot read a window like that. Only the newer Windows 10 (1903 and up) capture method can, and Automatic, which is the default and what most people are on, does not choose it. Painting an opaque background behind the overlay never rescued it, because the failure is underneath the page rather than in it.
Transparency is decided when a window is created and cannot be switched later, so one window could never be both the click-through game overlay and something a capture tool can read. There are now two windows, and which one is on screen is exactly what capture mode means. The capture window is opaque, has a title bar, can be dragged and sits in the taskbar. The card no longer tells anyone to go and change their capture method, because any of them works now.
Chroma keying was erasing the watermark. OBS measures how close a pixel is to the key colour using colour alone and throws brightness away, so a dark panel sitting over green is still pure green and keys out completely. The watermark is what a free licence trades for this feature, so a keyed-out watermark was a clean overlay without Pro. The backgrounds that have to survive the key are now genuinely opaque.
The opacity slider is switched off while chroma key is on, with the reason beside it rather than the control quietly doing nothing. Fading the overlay does not make the capture see-through: the keyer deletes part-faded pixels instead of passing them through, thinnest strokes first, so it never faded your overlay, it deleted it.
Two things could take your scene away after you had set it up. Resetting the overlay's layout also dropped you out of capture mode and discarded the position you had dragged the window to, which left an always-on-top blank rectangle in OBS and nothing over the game. And a game launching opened the transparent overlay even for people in capture mode, so the window their scene was pointed at stayed dark. Both now respect the mode you are in.
Packs that arrive with the author's instructions
A pack has always been settings and a name. Now it can carry what the author actually wants to tell you: headings, paragraphs, numbered steps, notes and up to eight screenshots. They appear on the pack's page on this site, and in the app's import preview above the list of what the pack will change, since the instructions are the part that tells you whether you want the changes.
You write them in the app, in a block editor whose preview is drawn by the same renderer an importer will see, so there is no second implementation that can disagree with it.
The description lives beside the pack rather than inside it. That is why a wrong instruction is a one-field edit rather than a new share code you have to send everybody again, and it is also why a pack opened from a file has no description while the same pack opened by its code does.
A new Your shared packs card lists everything you have published. Without it a description would have been write-once: publishing was the only moment the app knew a share code your account owned, so navigating away meant a mistake could never be corrected. It is collapsed until you open it, and opening it is what loads the list.
Two honest limits, stated rather than hidden. The editor refuses to open a description containing block types your build does not know about, because saving replaces the whole document and would otherwise delete them without telling you. And an image you add and then remove keeps its slot out of your eight until you save, which is what makes removing a block undoable up to that point.
Auto sprint no longer engages while your keyboard drives the stick
This is a removal, and it is worth reading if you use it.
Auto sprint holds L3 once you push the movement stick past a threshold you set, anywhere from 20 to 100 percent in five-point steps. That is a control for an analog stick, and a keyboard is not analog. W, A, S and D produce three fixed amounts and nothing in between: stopped, a walk, and a full push. So across all seventeen positions of that slider the threshold had two possible answers, and "do not sprint" was not one of them - the test is "at least this far", and a full push satisfies even 100 percent. L3 was therefore held down for the entire time you were moving. On an Xbox output L3 is sprint, and in Call of Duty sprinting blocks interaction, so the setting did not merely fail to work, it broke something else while looking like it was working.
So auto sprint now does nothing while your keyboard is driving the movement stick. If you want sprint from the keyboard, bind L3, which the shipped defaults already put on Shift. The setting stays visible and enabled, because it is a real setting for a real controller and you may be configuring one you are not currently driving with the keyboard, and the Sticks page now says plainly when it is not doing anything. On a physical pad, nothing about it has changed.
A third pass over Drive a Controller
Every timing window in the product was running about 40 percent long. The engine's clock added whole milliseconds each tick and threw the remainder away, and a real tick is between 1 and 2.2 milliseconds, so the clock gained about 1 millisecond for every 1.4 of real time. A 250ms hold took roughly 350ms, a 300ms double tap roughly 430ms, and turbo set to 10 pulses a second ran at about 7. Everything that measures time now keeps the remainder, so anything you tuned by feel against the old behaviour is worth a second look.
Aim down sights did nothing at the settings it ships with. Scope sensitivity starts at 100 percent and the engine only slows your aim below 100 percent, so the most likely first thing anyone does with the feature - bind right mouse, alt-tab, play - changed nothing at all, while the line under the control said it was working. It now says what is actually true and points at the one setting that turns it on.
The other one worth stating on its own is pack import. A pack carrying a keyboard section replaced your whole Drive setup with the shipped defaults, and the case that hurt most was unticking Keyboard and Mouse in the picker - the one action a person takes specifically to protect their keyboard setup was the one that destroyed it. A pack that mentioned nothing but a sensitivity did the same, because the parts it did not mention were filled in from the defaults rather than left as yours. A pack's keyboard section is now laid on top of your setup instead of replacing it: what the pack states wins, and every field it never mentions stays exactly as you had it.
Several fixes in this pass are the same shape as each other: the app knew something and did not say it. The bindings page now explains that your game sees a controller and therefore uses its controller layout and its controller settings tab, which is the answer to a real report that Warzone forces a hold to interact even when it is set to tap. The Play Mode card now says your game will not be the focused window while it is open, and that some games slow down or pause when they are not in front. The status strip stops printing that your keyboard and mouse are driving the controller in the largest, greenest element on the page while the drive gate is shut and nothing is reaching the game - and the link that shuts that gate can now be turned off from the page that is failing, instead of sending you to another page to hunt for a switch by name. The Response slider stops telling a 240Hz player to match a number the control cannot reach, since it stops at 144 and shows words rather than figures. And both quick turn rows now say they need Mouse aims on, rather than only the right-hand one.
The hotkey the tour teaches you to press was the expensive one. Every press of the Drive hotkey made two server round trips and took a fresh licence grant before the mouse started aiming again, and getting in and out of a game menu with that key is exactly the routine the first-run tour teaches. It is local and instant now when your session is already running.
Two things were costing frames for everyone, whether or not you use Drive. An invisible full-screen window existed the whole time OmniControl was running, waiting to show notifications. A window like that sitting over a game stops the game being handed straight to the display and makes Windows composite its frames instead, for every customer, every session. It is now a small corner panel, parked off the screen entirely unless a notification is actually on it. And macro playback spun the processor through the last two milliseconds of every step, which on a hold-repeat recoil macro is continuous for as long as you are shooting: 13 to 20 percent of a core, measured, now replaced by a timer that waits properly for none of it. Two smaller ones went with them - the lightbar animations woke the interface about 62 times a second for every user, including the majority who own no DualSense at all, and the Sticks page kept redrawing eleven times a second behind a fullscreen game to fade trails nobody could see.
Finally, the tool that should have existed before any of this. Copy pad trace records what the virtual pad actually sent, which nothing recorded before, and which is why the Warzone report above took three passes to settle: every other diagnostic in the app describes what came in. Identical consecutive reports collapse into a repeat count, so one export covers minutes of play rather than four seconds. Controller output only: no keystrokes, and no window or process names.