Documentation for Notifications API

[BenWoodford]

Some of it's fairly obvious (like the contents of NotificationBitmap_t, text, handle, etc) but the ones that aren't so obvious:

• ulUserValue
• type
• style

Been looking forward to having a notifications API as it's a pain to make them yourself, so it's great to see it being introduced.

[BenWoodford]

Addendum, both myself and others have been having problems using anything other than an empty bitmap on this. @matzman666 care to chime in on this?

[matzman666]

Yeah, I also didn't get the NotificationBitmap_t to work. I tried to use GetOverlayImageData() to fill the NotificationBitmap_t with data from an existing overlay, but to no avail (My reasoning was that openVR uses GetOverlayImageData() to retrieve a default icon when you don't specify your own). The exact code I used to achieve this can be found here.

An important point that is not clear at all is who takes ownership of the notification bitmap data. NotificationBitmap_t contains a void* pointer to the image data. When I pass the bitmap data to createNotification(), is the data copied and I can immediately free the buffer (that's what I tried to do and I didn't get a segmentation fault, so it seems plausible), or does OpenVR takes ownership of the buffer?

@BenWoodford
You can find information about the type and style parameter here. The ulUserValue seems to be used as an unique id for system notifications, and it seems also to be used in notification events.

[BenWoodford]

That's helpful thanks, I use the C# header which doesn't have the comments, shall have to keep an eye on the .h file for documentation.

[BOLL7708]

I also use the C# wrapper but I never got notifications to work, I looked at it periodically over many months. Finally I used the working albeit somewhat outdated library SteamVR_HUDCenter. The author mentions that missing handles were manually added back to the wrapper to specifically expose notification functionality.

That would explain why notifications are tricky to get working in C# with the wrapper Valve provides, using the above mentioned library I have notifications with bitmaps working.

[BenWoodford]

Yeah, I've got a similar addition. Curious as to how you got the right icon texture to work though?

[BOLL7708]

I actually checked the sample project in SteamVR_HUDCenter and used this snippet.

Incidentally I have problems getting my notifications to show up anymore, but then I'm messing about with my universe settings so they might appear on the other side of the planet for all I know :P

[BenWoodford]

Hmm. I did a similar thing here and it ended up showing me something irrelevant (the texture of the overlay I believe). Weird.