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/cwspout

Syntax

/cwspout
/cwspout on
/cwspout off
/cwspout toggle

Description

Toggle a Spout2 video sender that publishes the game frame without the clockwork overlay drawn into it, so OBS can capture a clean feed while the overlay still shows on your own screen. Bare /cwspout toggles; on/off set it explicitly. Off by default.

Why this exists

OBS Game Capture and the clockwork overlay both hook the same DirectX Present call, and OBS re-applies its hook on a timer. Whichever hooked last runs first, so whether OBS captures the frame before or after the overlay is drawn — and sometimes whether it hooks the window at all — comes down to a race. That's the "sometimes it shows my ImGui windows, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it never loads the window" behaviour.

/cwspout sidesteps it. clockwork copies the backbuffer before it draws the overlay and publishes that clean copy over Spout — a shared-texture channel. OBS reads the clean texture directly, so:

  • The feed is always overlay-free — it never depends on hook order.
  • OBS does not inject into EverQuest II at all, so the flaky Game Capture hooking (and the run-as-Administrator / window-match fiddling) goes away.
  • You still see the overlay on your own monitor.

Setup

  1. Install the Spout2 plugin for OBS (the OBS Spout2 Capture source), then restart OBS.
  2. In game: /cwspout on.
  3. In OBS: Add Source → Spout2 Capture, and select the sender named after your character. The sender is named from the game window's title, which clockwork keeps set to the logged-in character name — so a character named Prettycrazy appears as the Prettycrazy sender. Multiboxing gives you one sender per client, each named for its own character.

Behaviour notes

  • Off by default, and free while off — no copy happens and no sender is created until you turn it on.
  • Turning it off drops the sender immediately, so it disappears from OBS's source list right away.
  • If Spout fails to start or send (for example a rare multisampled backbuffer, which the shared-texture copy can't handle), the sender fails soft: it logs overlay: Spout sender disabled (...) once and turns itself off rather than disturbing the client. Fix the cause (e.g. finish installing the OBS plugin) and run /cwspout on again to retry.

Verifying it's clean

With the Spout2 source added in OBS, open the clockwork console with End while streaming: the console should appear on your monitor but not in the OBS preview of the Spout source. If it does show up there, you're looking at a Game Capture / Window Capture source of the game rather than the Spout2 source.

See also