DesktopBuddy

DesktopBuddy brings your desktop into Resonite with a virtual camera and microphone to integrate your destkop completly and seemlessly into resonite.

Install

Easy Install

1. Follow instructions here to setup resonite with Gale, a mod manager for bepis mods. https://modding.resonite.net/getting-started/installation/

2. Search for DesktopBuddy and enable the mod.

3. Launch resonite with Gale.

Thunderstore packages update more slowly because every release can require review.

Manual Install

Manual GitHub release zips are the bleeding-edge path. They include both DesktopBuddy and the runtime payloads in one self-contained zip.

1. Download DesktopBuddy-x.y.z.zip from the latest GitHub release, then extract it into the correct root folder. The zip contains the BepInEx and Renderer folders used by the manual install layout.

2. Choose install method: For Gale, extract into the profile root:

%APPDATA%\com.kesomannen.gale\resonite\profiles\Default

For another Gale profile, replace Default with that profile folder name.

For a manual BepisLoader install, extract into the Resonite install folder:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Resonite

For manual installs, launch Resonite with BepisLoader enabled, such as with --hookfxr-enable.

Install or enable these loader packages too:

• BepisLoader
• BepisResoniteWrapper
• InterprocessLib
• BepInExRenderer
• RenderiteHook

Linux prerequisites

⚠️ Linux support is experimental and may have issues. The core "share your desktop into Resonite" flow works (capture, input as touch, audio, virtual camera, streaming), but expect rough edges. In particular, the capture → renderer-side path is currently a CPU copy rather than a full GPU pipeline — due to some complexity this is a temporary path, so it may cause performance issues until it's replaced with a proper end-to-end GPU pipeline.

On Linux, DesktopBuddy uses your system's FFmpeg and cloudflared (loaded at runtime), and the virtual camera needs the v4l2loopback kernel module. DesktopBuddy cannot install packages for you, so install these first:

# Arch / CachyOS
sudo pacman -S ffmpeg v4l2loopback-dkms cloudflared

PipeWire and xdg-desktop-portal (used for screen capture) ship with most modern Wayland desktops. After installing v4l2loopback, open Devices → "Virtual camera setup" in-world to load and configure the camera module.

Renderer-side mod loading (required)

You must add the following prefix to your Steam launch options for Resonite:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="winhttp=n,b" %command%

If you already have launch options, keep them after %command%, for example:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="winhttp=n,b" %command% -SkipIntroTutorial

This goes in Steam's launch options even if you launch from Gale. Gale's default launch mode shells out to steam -applaunch, so Steam is still what builds the Proton environment, and both sets of arguments are merged.

Why it is needed: on Linux, Resonite splits into a native host process and a Windows renderer running under Proton. The host gets its mods through BepisLoader, but the renderer is a Windows process, so its mods load through Doorstop's winhttp.dll proxy — and Wine only prefers that file over its own built-in winhttp when you set the override above.

Without it, DesktopBuddy still loads, still appears on the dial, and the portal picker still works, so nothing looks obviously broken — but DesktopBuddySharedTextureBridge never loads in the renderer, so captured panels stay blank forever. The give-away in the host log is an endless repeat of:

[UpdateLoop] Waiting for shared texture bind before applying DisplayIndex=... slot=...

To confirm the override took effect, launch once and check that this file exists:

<profile>/Renderer/BepInEx/LogOutput.log

If that file is missing, Doorstop never injected and the override is not being applied.

Screen-sharing permissions

DesktopBuddy asks the desktop portal to remember your selection so a shared source can be re-shared without a picker dialog every time. On KDE this appears in the remembered screen-sharing permissions list. DesktopBuddy revokes each grant once it is superseded or the saved source is removed, so you should see at most one entry per remembered source rather than one per share. You can inspect the list with:

busctl --user call org.freedesktop.impl.portal.PermissionStore \
  /org/freedesktop/impl/portal/PermissionStore \
  org.freedesktop.impl.portal.PermissionStore List s remote-desktop

Cursor magnification on KDE

While a panel is shared, two things drive one pointer: DesktopBuddy injecting motion where your laser points, and your real mouse. The cursor snaps between the two positions many times a second, and KWin's "Shake cursor to find it" effect — on by default in Plasma 6 — reads that as shaking and magnifies the cursor, growing it further the longer it continues.

DesktopBuddy handles this for you: it unloads KWin's shakecursor effect while any panel is shared and restores it once the last one closes. It only restores what it actually suspended, so an effect you had already turned off stays off. The effect is unloaded at runtime rather than disabled in kwinrc, so if Resonite crashes mid-share your configuration is untouched and the effect returns on the next KWin restart or reconfigure.

Set linuxSuspendShakeCursor = false in the mod config if you would rather DesktopBuddy left your compositor alone. To restore the effect by hand:

qdbus6 org.kde.KWin /Effects org.kde.kwin.Effects.loadEffect shakecursor

This applies to KWin only; other compositors have no such effect and DesktopBuddy does nothing there.

Features

• Spawn full desktops or monitors (and individual application windows on Windows) as grabbable curved panels.
• Interact with captured panels using VR controllers, hand tracking, or touch input.
• Fully GPU-accelerated desktop capture on Windows via Windows Graphics Capture. On Linux, capture uses PipeWire / xdg-desktop-portal, currently with a CPU copy on the renderer-side path (see Linux prerequisites).
• Stream panels to other users through local encoding and remote HTTPS tunnel support.
• Virtual video camera (DirectShow on Windows, v4l2loopback on Linux) so you can do video calls from within Resonite.
• Virtual microphone driver (Windows) so friends can hear you in calls in Resonite.
• Use privacy controls for hiding or limiting what other users can see.
• Adjust capture, streaming, audio, culling, viewer, and debug options from the in-world settings panel.
• Keep game-side and renderer-side work separated through the shared texture bridge.

Credits

Special thanks to the projects and libraries DesktopBuddy builds on.

Project	What DesktopBuddy uses it for
BepisLoader	Game-side BepInEx loader
BepisResoniteWrapper	Resonite engine-ready startup hook
InterprocessLib	Control messages between the game plugin and renderer bridge
BepInEx.Renderer	Renderer-side BepInEx loader
RenderiteHook	Renderer-side hook support
FFmpeg	H.264/HEVC encoding libraries in DesktopBuddyRuntime
FFmpeg.AutoGen	C# bindings for FFmpeg, packaged in DesktopBuddyRuntime
cloudflared	Bundled Cloudflare Tunnel client for public HTTPS stream URLs
SoftCam	DirectShow virtual camera filter
VB-Cable	Virtual microphone driver; no public source repository is provided by VB-Audio
Harmony	Runtime patching
CsWinRT	Windows Runtime interop support used by Windows.Graphics.Capture

License

AGPL-3.0 - see LICENSE.