Banjo-Chatooie

A mod for Banjo-Kazooie: Recompiled that puts your Twitch chat into the game.

This is a beta. It is much more solid than 0.2.0: the crash that made that version hard to recommend has been found and fixed. It was not in the mod at all -- the build script installed files by overwriting them while the game had them open, which pulled a library out from under a running process. That only ever affected people building from source, so if you installed 0.2.0 from a release or through the mod manager, you were not hitting it.

Two runs since the fix have gone an hour and half an hour with a message every few seconds and no crash, against about ten minutes before it. Nothing is corrupted if it does crash, and your save file is not touched.

Still honest about what is untested: nobody has run this on a live stream, and the channel points feature has only ever talked to Twitch's mock server, never a real account, so signing in and creating the reward for real are unproven. Please say what goes wrong.

Two things happen with an incoming message. It scrolls in a small panel in the corner of the screen, and, if you want, a character from the game reads it aloud in one of Banjo-Kazooie's own text boxes, with that character's portrait and their voice. Bottles, Mumbo, Grunty, Klungo, the Jinjos: chat picks who speaks.

The connection is anonymous and read-only. The mod never asks for a Twitch account, a password or a token, and it cannot send messages or join more than the one channel you name. (The optional channel points feature is the exception, and it asks for permission separately. More on that below.)

Installing

Copy both of these into your mods folder, which is ~/.config/BanjoRecompiled/mods on Linux:

• banjo_chatooie.nrm
• banjo_chatooie_native.so

They have to sit next to each other. The mod will not load if the second file is missing, and putting it anywhere else has no effect.

Then enable the mod in the game's mod menu.

Getting chat on screen

Open the mod's options and type your channel name into Twitch Channel, with no #. That is the only required setting. Chat should appear within a couple of seconds, and you can change the channel while playing without restarting.

The panel shows each chatter's name in their own Twitch colour. You can move it to any corner, change how many lines it keeps, its text size and how solid its background is. Show Chat Overlay turns it off completely, which is what you want if you would rather chat only appeared through the game's text boxes.

Making characters talk

Characters Speak On decides what makes a character read a message out loud:

!say command is the default and works on any channel. Someone types !say hello everyone in chat and a character says it. Who Can Use !say can narrow that to you and your moderators if chat gets carried away.

Channel point reward uses a proper channel points redemption. It needs Twitch Affiliate and a small script running alongside the game, described in helper/README.md.

Highlight My Message uses the built-in reward of that name. Also Affiliate only.

Every message makes every single line of chat get spoken. Chaotic, but it is the fastest way to see whether everything works.

When the game wants to talk

Story dialogue always wins. Walk up to a molehill or an NPC while a chat box is on screen and the chat box gets out of the way, so you never have to wait for chat to finish before the game can talk to you. The interrupted message is spoken afterwards rather than thrown away.

Nothing is ever spoken during a cutscene, or across a map transition. Messages that arrive then wait their turn.

Choosing who speaks

Start the message with a name and a colon. !say mumbo: hello banjo comes out of Mumbo, in Mumbo's voice. Anything without a recognised name falls back to the Default Character setting.

Every name chat can use, all case-insensitive. A ✔ means someone has watched that one draw the right face in game.

The main cast banjo ✔ · kazooie ✔ · tooty · uglytooty · crocbanjo · bottles · mumbo · cheato ✔

Grunty and her lot grunty ✔ · gruntilda ✔ · sexygrunty · brentilda ✔ · klungo · dingpot ✔ · cauldron · warpcauldron · vile · lockup · littlelockup

Mumbo's Mountain conga ✔ · chimpy · juju · ticker · termite

Treasure Trove Cove blubber · nipper · snacker · yumyum · leaky

Clanker's Cavern clanker · snippet · blacksnippet

Bubblegloop Swamp tiptup · tanktup · flibbit · mummum · croctus · piranha · choirmember

Freezeezy Peak boggy ✔ · wozza · twinkly · chomper · bearcubs · bluegift · greengift · redgift

Gobi's Valley gobi · rubee · jinxy · ancientone · sandeel · grabba

Mad Monster Mansion motzhand · tumblar · loggo · gloop · teehee

Rusty Bucket Bay snorkel · boombox

Click Clock Wood nabnut ✔ · eyrie ✔ · youngeyrie · gnawty · caterpillar · worm · zubba · trunker

Jinjos jinjo (yellow) · yellowjinjo · greenjinjo · bluejinjo · pinkjinjo · orangejinjo

These are read from the game's own portrait table, so a name gives you the character it says. Earlier versions guessed at a few and got them wrong -- asking for Klungo used to produce a gift-wrapped Christmas present.

You can also pick a portrait by number. !say #87: hello uses portrait 87 directly, and anything from 12 to 106 works. That reaches a handful of oddities with no name of their own, including the collectable icons around 37 to 48.

What chat cannot say

The game's text boxes were built in 1998 for text Rare wrote, so a few things do not survive the trip:

Everything is drawn in capitals, because the font has no lowercase letters at all. Accented letters are turned into their plain equivalents, so "mañana" comes out as MANANA rather than losing the letter. Emoji, Japanese and anything else without a reasonable stand-in is dropped, and a message made entirely of those is skipped instead of opening an empty box. Very long words get a space forced into them, because a word wider than the text box would otherwise crash the game outright.

None of this affects the corner panel, which shows messages exactly as typed, emoji and all.

Channel points

Redemptions are not part of Twitch chat, so they need a helper script running next to the game and a one-time authorisation. Setup takes about two minutes and is written up in helper/README.md.

It needs Twitch Affiliate. Without channel points on your account there is nothing for it to read, and !say is the trigger to use instead.

While you are testing

Debug: Boot To Map drops you straight into a level when the game starts, skipping the intro and the file select. It loads no save file, so the world comes up empty, and it deliberately switches the game to a separate scratch save file so your real save is never touched. Useful for trying things quickly, not for playing. Leave it off otherwise.

Troubleshooting

If nothing appears in the corner, check the channel name is spelled right and has no #. The panel tells you what it is doing, so it will say whether it is connecting, connected or failing.

If characters never speak, check Characters Speak On is not set to Off, and remember that nothing is spoken during cutscenes. Messages that arrive then are not lost, they wait and play once the cutscene ends.

If a character's portrait is not who you expected, please report it. The names are read from the game's own portrait table now, so they should all be right, and a wrong one is worth knowing about. !say #<number>: test will find the right one in the meantime.

If the game crashes, please report it, with roughly how long you had been playing and which Characters Speak On setting you were using. The crash that dogged 0.2.0 is fixed, so a crash now is something new and worth hearing about. It was never a risk to your save file and still is not.

If you build the mod yourself, make sure you are not installing over a copy the game currently has open -- that was the 0.2.0 crash, and DEVELOPING.md explains it.

Building it yourself

See DEVELOPING.md.

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Use it, change it, share it, build on it. Two conditions: credit the original, and release anything you derive from it under the same licence, so it stays open for the next person.

Banjo-Kazooie itself belongs to Nintendo and Rare. Nothing here contains any part of the game, and you need your own copy to play it.