I’ve recently tried to submit my game build and demo build for review and got rejected with the following issue on both builds: “The Social Overlay is not present in the build when pressing SHIFT & F3. While your achievements are configured, users must be able to see your achievements in this overlay along with XP values.”
The game is made with a custom C++ engine using OpenGL, and I’ve successfully tested the overlay on Nvidia (Win10) and AMD (Win10), but unsuccessfully on Intel (Win11) and macOS (Apple Silicon).
I know that the OpenGL overlay support is considered experimental, but nowhere is mentioned that the overlay is a requirement for releasing on the Epic Games Store.
I was also confused that the overlay should be available in the demo build, as the demo does not even support achievements. In fact the demo doesn’t even ship with the EOS library, as it doesn’t use any EOS features and would increase the size by +100%.
Could you please help me and clarify the requirements for the Epic Games Overlay?
Thank you,
Martin
(the question was originally posted on the Epic Online Service discussion board, and I was requested to post it here again)
The overlay is not explicitly required, but we do need to have a way to validate achievements are working. Without knowing the details of the title, my guess is the team doing the testing did not see achievements working in the build they tested. Can you share the product ID of your title so I can look it up on our side?
Additionally, the demo would need to support achievements if the demo is available on other PC storefronts and supports achievements on those other storefronts.
The new review was successful today for both the base game and the demo. If you still want to look it up, the product ID is 7dd83e44b6984bd0b92c5b6a1850a9cb.
The demo does not support achievements on any platform or storefront, so I think that should be fine.
I was just concerned that the overlay is a hard requirement (based on the issue description). That would have gotten me into some trouble as the game only supports OpenGL, and it looks like the OpenGL overlay still has issues on Intel GPUs.
Understood, I was able to connect with the team internally, correct the overlay is not required. Happy to try and work with you on troubleshooting where the overlay is having issues however so that it is a uniform experience for players (and they get proper in game notifications when unlocking achievements). If you can get a build with verbose eos logging enabled and share the output on a platform it fails, we can take a look.
Thank you, I’ve sent you an archive with the EOS log of an Intel device where the overlay doesn’t work, and another log of an AMD device where the overlay works for comparison.
The interesting part is probably this:
Epic: Record Event: Overlay.OverlayInitializeFailed (LogEOSAnalytics, level 500)
Epic: Vertex shader compilation failed: ERROR: 0:2: '' : syntax error: #version directive must occur in a shader before anything else
I ran into similar issues while testing my game on Intel, as their shader compiler is always a bit more unforgiving.
(the logs also mention that EOS is successfully initializing the D3D11 overlay, but the game definitely runs on OpenGL)
Yes, it is a very basic Intel Pentium Silver N6000 with OpenGL 4.6 (even though the Intel page mentions just 4.5).
The engine itself supports OpenGL 2.0 - 4.6 and selects the highest available version.
Ok thanks, the next step would be to see if there is a newer driver for the intel chip that you can install if possible. We will also look to add a version to the shader source in a future release but likely not anytime soon unfortunately. Just trying to take some stabs considering OpenGL is still considered experimental.
Thank you, it looks like the newest available driver is installed.
It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think I can fix that issue (easily) on my end, as it seems to be related to a non-standard GLSL shader used by the overlay, which is ignored by AMD and Nvidia drivers but not by the Intel driver.
I guess as long as players can unlock achievements (which seems to work) it should be fine for now and I hope the problem can be addressed in a future release. I also hope for a future overlay support on macOS (and even Linux ).
Thanks for that. The issue looks to reside specifically with the driver, but we may be able to work in a fix after the Epic Summer Break as we have a few minor overlay updates we could bundle together. In this case it looks like the issue is due to the fact we haven’t ever included a version in the OpenGL shaders, and it seems like this is an over strict driver.
According to the GLSL spec:
Version 1.10 of the language does not require shaders to include this directive, and shaders that do not include a # version directive will be treated as targeting version 1.10
So something with the driver isnt behaving properly but if just adding the verison directive fixes it, hopefully we can get something out by early August at the latest.
).