DesktopBuddy

DesktopBuddy brings your Windows desktop into Resonite as native-feeling world-space panels. It is built for people who want their real desktop, monitors, and application windows available inside a world without turning the experience into a flat screen overlay.

Features

• Spawn full desktops, monitors, or individual application windows as grabbable curved panels.
• Interact with windows using VR controller, hand tracking, or touch input.
• Fully gpu accelerated WGC desktop capture.
• Stream panels to other users through local encoding and remote HTTPS tunnel support.
• Virtual video camera drivers for windows so you can do video calls from within resonite.
• Virtual microphone driver for 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.

License

AGPL-3.0 - see LICENSE.

1.1.0 - 2026-06-29

⚠️ Linux support is experimental and may have issues. 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 and may cause performance issues until it's replaced with a proper end-to-end GPU pipeline. (Windows is unaffected.)

Linux input now works

• Sharing a desktop now injects real input via xdg-desktop-portal RemoteDesktop. Capture and input share a single portal session, so there's one permission dialog and one restore token; re-sharing an already-authorized monitor skips the dialog.
• All panel interaction is touch — laser press, drag, and release map to portal touch events (NotifyTouchDown/Motion/Up), with the per-hand touch id as the touch slot, so multiple hands/users touching a panel are real multitouch. Dragging a panel is a touch-drag.
• Mouse-wheel and controller-stick scrolling work (smooth-axis scroll). Note: scrolling inside XWayland apps (e.g. Steam, Discord) can stutter — this is an XWayland smooth-scroll limitation; native-Wayland apps scroll smoothly.

1.0.20 - 2026-06-26

Linux support (EXPERIMENTAL)

DesktopBuddy now runs on native Linux Resonite. This is an early, experimental port. The core "share your desktop into Resonite" flow works, but several features are incomplete or broken — please read the known issues below before relying on it.

• Desktop/window capture on Wayland via xdg-desktop-portal (PipeWire), with a Linux source picker in the context menu and saved sources for one-click re-sharing.
• Native streaming pipeline (FFmpeg) so remote viewers still get a stream.
• Desktop audio captured via PipeWire and muxed into the stream (AAC), excluding Resonite's own output.
• Virtual camera via v4l2loopback ("DesktopBuddy - Camera"), with a Devices-tab setup action that loads and configures the module. Install ffmpeg, cloudflared, and v4l2loopback-dkms yourself first — see the Linux prerequisites in the README; DesktopBuddy cannot install packages.
• Cloudflare tunnel runs natively using your system cloudflared.
• GPU frames are shared to the renderer through a native DMA-buf texture bridge.

Known issues / not working yet on Linux:

• Input does not work — you can see and hear the desktop, but mouse/keyboard input to the captured windows is not functional yet.
• Direct single-window audio is broken — only full-desktop / native-stream audio works; sharing an individual window's audio does not.
• Expect other rough edges; the Linux platform is a work in progress.

(Windows is unaffected and continues to work as before.)

Settings & UI

• New "Dynamic lights" toggle (General tab, default off): casts an in-game light that matches the captured screen's average color.
• New "Windows I open start private" toggle so panels you spawn start in Private mode.
• Stream audio now defaults to muted (volume 0) so viewers opt in to hearing it.
• DesktopBuddy remembers your Linux desktop/window sources for instant re-sharing.
• The Diagnostics button can now also upload the log and spawn it in-game.

Fixes

• Patched a Resonite engine bug where your avatar's EyeManager gets disabled (eyes freeze) while you look at your own DesktopBuddy panel. Resonite's idle eye-look targets the panel's local-only screen with a synced reference and throws "Cannot reference local targets from a non-local reference", which disables the EyeManager. This patch keeps the EyeManager from targeting local-only surfaces so the bug no longer triggers, until Resonite fixes it upstream.
• Stability fixes around stream URL binding, private/public toggling, panel resizing, and session cleanup.

1.0.18 - 2026-05-24

Windows 10 support

• Reworked WGC and D3D11 capture lifecycle handling to avoid Windows 10 freezes during window spawn, resize, and teardown.
• Moved capture resize recreation and shared texture publishing onto safer lifecycle paths so the game update loop is not blocked by slow Windows graphics calls.
• Added current-size shared texture publishing so local panels wait for a valid frame/texture size before binding the renderer bridge.
• Added D3D11 adapter selection and renderer adapter hints so the capture device and renderer device are less likely to land on incompatible GPUs.
• Improved frame callback draining, shared texture release, and D3D resource cleanup to avoid use-after-release and dispose-while-copying races.
• Added more targeted logging around WGC frame pool recreation, shared texture creation, D3D device selection, and cleanup stalls.

Runtime

• Cleaned up FFmpeg texture lifetime and resize behavior so encoder reinitialization does not reuse released D3D resources.
• Improved Cloudflare tunnel startup and shutdown handling, including process cleanup during local restart builds.
• Kept remote stream ownership and URL rebinding stable across resize-driven encoder replacement.
• Fixed several session cleanup paths so capture, bridge slots, encoders, and streams are released in a more predictable order.

Shared Texture Bridge

• Added versioned shared texture bridge protocol messages for start, stop, running, stopped, and renderer device hints.
• Added generation checks so stale renderer acknowledgements cannot mark an old shared texture slot as running.
• Added locking around host bridge slot state because the game update path and InterprocessLib callbacks can touch the same slot arrays from different threads.
• Deferred renderer-side native texture/SRV release for a few frames to avoid Unity/render-thread use-after-free during texture replacement.
• Removed unused named shared texture plumbing from the WGC side; the bridge now uses shared handles.

UI And Session Behavior

• Fixed viewer culling issues and simplified culling so users in no-clip are supported without physics-based checks.
• Improved quick-menu and settings-panel resize behavior while keeping the menu raycast path compatible with normal Resonite camera portals.
• Added adaptive screen lighting support for captured panels.
• Added private-start support for spawned desktop panels and kept private mode restoration stable.
• Improved window polling and auto-spawn behavior so DesktopBuddy tracks new windows with less work on the game thread.

Diagnostics And Packaging

• Added a diagnostics collector script and included it in the package so users can send logs, Windows details, and existing crash dumps without creating huge live process dumps.