This is a hard question to answer, because it depends on trusting me, a random developer, to answer honestly. For my part, I feel it's safe; the app never has access to your Twitch password or stream key, and I've done everything I can to make sure viewers can't cause the game to crash or break. But if I were a malicious attacker trying to steal your Twitch info, I would say the same things.

If you're inclined, you can find links to the source code below, and either inspect it or (for the truly paranoid) build it yourself. You can also see the experiences of other streamers who have used this mod, including Beaglerush[www.twitch.tv] and MrCloista[www.twitch.tv].

This should be safe to add mid-campaign, but I haven't tried with all the mods out there. Back up your save first.

You cannot remove this mod from a campaign in progress.

During a mission, you can change the selected unit's owner by clicking the "Change Owner" button in the bottom left.

While in the Avenger, select a soldier in the Armory and you'll see a "Set Twitch Username" button.

Unfortunately no. XCOM 2 is built on Unreal Engine 3, which uses UTF-16 encoding for text. I've tried, but there doesn't appear to be any way I can convert the UTF-8 from Twitch to UTF-16 and have Unreal recognize it properly.

Because of this, viewers with non-ASCII names are not able to use chat commands, win raffles, and so on. Allowing them to was leading to game crashes.

The game only attempts to connect to the app during missions and while you're in the Avenger. If you're on the main menu or in a loading screen, no connection is occurring.

Most of the permissions are straightforward, e.g. the app can read chat in order to support chat commands. Probably the most concerning permission is the ability to "perform moderation actions". This is because the app can temporarily time out (not ban) viewers. Timing out viewers lets you set up funny moments like a channel point reward that times out the enemy team, or a Roll the Dice outcome that times out the user.

That's too big of a topic to cover here. Check out the GitHub wiki[github.com] for instructions.

No. The only way to do this would be requiring Bits to be included when using a chat command. This is too easy for a viewer to mess up (too few/too many Bits), and the streamer can't refund them if that happens.

Twitch may provide support for custom Power-ups[help.twitch.tv] in the future, which would mostly avoid these issues. If this happens, I may incorporate them into Twitch Integration.

Make sure you're running the stream app, as per the setup instructions. Without it, the game will fill the log with errors that quickly make the game run terribly.

XCOM 2 is built on Unreal Engine 3, which is pretty old. It's old enough that there's no built-in support for HTTPS, which (along with some other technologies) is required to securely communicate with Twitch services. Implementing HTTPS in the mod directly would be a Bad Idea for a lot of reasons.

Instead, the app is built with modern technologies and handles secure communication with Twitch. The mod then talks only with the app, which is safe because that back-and-forth never leaves your computer.

Yes, you can find the code for both on GitHub - the mod here[github.com], and the app here[github.com].

No.