Screenshot help

[regoarrarr]

I used to use alt-printscreen to take a screenshot and then paste it into Paint and save as a JPG. I used to write my reports as I went.

I now thought I would try to just take brief notes with screenshots and then write the report later. I seemed to remember that you just hit the printscreen button and Civ4 would save the screenshot in the ScreenShots directory.

So I've been doing that for Epic 4, and I go to start writing my report and lo and behold there are no screenshots!!!

I do have
AllowScreenShots = 1
in my civ.ini

A couple of times while playing, I would hit PrintScreen and it would say "Screenshot Failed" but most of the time it was nothing and I figured it was just saving it, but alas, nothing

Any ideas?

[pling]

Do you have one of those dumb keyboards where the function keys have fancy things on them - like F2 is also "Undo", F3 is also "Redo" etc, and there's an 'F-lock' key? I've got one of those (only way I could get a MS Natural keyboard with the arrow key layout that I like, yeah, I'm fussy ) and I've found that if F-lock is on then Prt-Scr doesn't work & doesn't let you know. Of course if F-lock is off then you can't use the function keys to bring up the advisors as they're 'special' rather than function keys :mad:

[regoarrarr]

Hmm I don't think so.

[Rex Tyrannus]

On my laptop, I have to press the function key first. On my standard keyboard, I have to make sure the F-Lock key is in the right position (not sure if it's on or off).

I used to lose a lot of screenies. Now I press shift-printscreen and get the screenshot dialog. Haven't lost a screenie since. (be sure to move the dialog out of the way of anything important because it sometimes gets included in the shot)

[regoarrarr]

Hmm I'll have to try shift-printscreen - hadn't heard that one since I used to do alt and ctrl - printscreen. Thanks!

[falsfire]

I still don't trust it. I hit PrintScrn (making sure my F-Lock is *OFF*), then slide my mouse pointer over to my 2nd monitor where Photoshop is waiting, hit File->New, Edit->Paste, presto there's the screenshot.

I also tend to crop the image and write my report as I go, however, as my memory is incredibly short and if I tried to write the report later, I'd be f***ed.

Who needs a good memory when you have a wife to remember all life's "important" details for you?


In other news, I'm still playing epic 4 and I don't know that I'm gonna be able to finish it in time!!! But fret ye not, as I write my report as I go I'll at least have a partial report to present to y'all...

[BeefontheBone]

I tend to just fire up IrfanView and run the Screenshot/Capture mode in the background - you can define the hotkey and where it saves them, as well as the quality and filetype settings, dead easily, then I edit/crop them etc in PS and Save For Web to optimise filesizes.

[regoarrarr]

I just downloaded irfanview and i think that will work out swimmingly - thanks!

[LordKestrel]

I use the built in screenshot feature of Civ, but I had to set AllowScreenshots = 0 in the ini file. Doing it that way auto dumps a screenshot in the directory, and I've never had a problem with it not working. When I had it set to 1, it would randomly not work.