Help with screenshots

[madscientist]

Sorry for such a simple questions/post, but how does everyone get screenshots of thier games, and how to you convert into a jpg for posting on the forum. I am not much of a computer guy (44 years old so I didn't grow up with them like I think most here did), and have a 5 year old Dell (which plays the games real well) running XP.

1) How do I make a screenshot? I know it's printscreen or something like that.
2) How do I get it as a jpg or something I can post on here? Is there something in windows that does this or do I have to download something

I am playing a BTS game with Musa and would like to post it as I go along but since I play Huge maps the files are too large to attach and screenshots would help more.

Thanks!

 

[frob2900]

How to get the screenshot
Just press the 'Print Screen' button and a screenshot gets saved into "My Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword/ScreenShots" (or "My Documents/My Games/Warlords/ScreenShots" depending on what version of Civ you are playing)

How to get the screenshot onto Civ Fanatics
Once you have the screenshots you want in the ScreenShots directory, you can get them onto CFC by just attaching them to your post (using the "Manage Attachments" button at the bottom of the post).

You can also get a PhotoBucket account (www.photobucket.com) and upload the file there. You can then paste the IMG link or the IMG thumbnail link (they appear in your PhotoBucket gallery) into the text of your post and it will display. Photobucket gives you a GB of space, which is much more than CFC gives you for attachments, so you can store a whole bunch of screenshots there. This also saves bandwidth for CFC

Important: PhotoBucket is good. ImageShack is slow, ad-riddled and bad. Use PhotoBucket.

Hot tip:
The format is .jpg by default (i.e. the screenshot gets saved as Civ4ScreenShotxxxx.jpg, where xxxx is a number, 0001, 0002 etc.), however you can change the format of screenshots by editing your CivilizationIV.ini file (its in the "My Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword" directory), just by changing the line:
"ScreenShot Format = JPG" to "ScreenShot Format = BMP"

That way your screenshots wont have .jpg compression artefacts (i.e. lower quality). This is useful if you need to get some small detail in higher quality. You can then load the .bmp screenshot into a graphics editing program and extract the detail and save it as a .gif or something.

 

[madscientist]

Thanks Frob, I will try this at home tonight once I have the game infont of me. I have got the printscreen things down now by pasting it into microsoftphotoeditor but going through the screenshot directory for BTS sounds like the way to go, and I will attempt to change default from jpg to bmp. I wil lokk into photobucket too.

 

[madscientist]

OK, here's a test.

 

[frob2900]

OK, here's a test.

Well, it's there, but it doesn't display in Firefox.

If you do make .bmp screenshots you should convert them to .gif before posting (remember, the idea behind .bmp->.gif is high-quality, so only use it when you need HQ, otherwise go with .jpg)

 

[madscientist]

OK, here's it saved as a JPG.

 

[frob2900]

Yep, it worked!

Btw. Nice city! Lots of

 

[madscientist]

Yep, it worked!

Btw. Nice city! Lots of

Thanks for the help!!!

Yes, nice city but I wish it was mine. It is a screenshot from another post (showing strength of late workshops) that cropped to test out.

 

[LlamaCat]

if you hit Shift + Print Screen, the game will give you the option to name your screenshot before you save it in the first place. very handy for organizing and quickly finding certain shots later in your folder.

 

[frob2900]

if you hit Shift + Print Screen, the game will give you the option to name your screenshot before you save it in the first place. very handy for organizing and quickly finding certain shots later in your folder.

Thanks, that's useful to know!