sufficiency
King
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2013
- Messages
- 682
Whether you are bragging about your achievements, or seeking help and advice on a seemingly hopeless game you are playing, it's always nice to post some screenshots in addition to a save file. Unfortunately, taking screenshots in Civ 5 is non-trivial and does not work right out of the box - which seems to be a particular problem a lot of people struggle with in the Strategy & Tips forum. Hopefully, this will dispel any difficulties you may have trying to show off your awesome (or troubled) empires.
1. Steam method
If you are running Civ 5 via Steam, the Steam method is probably the better (and the easier) method. Steam provides a set of tools for generating and collecting screenshots taken for your Steam games, and USUALLY you can easily do so by pressing F12. Unfortunately, in Civ 5 F12 is bound as a shortcut for "loading last quicksave", so pressing F12 on Civ 5 will generally give you a black screen.
To my best knowledge, there are no easy way to rebind your F12 key to any other functions for Civ 5
mad. Therefore, you should consider rebinding your "taking screenshot" key for Steam. To do so, from your Steam window, to go Steam -> Settings, then for the In-Game tab, change the hotkey for taking screenshots from F12 to something else (I use "\").
Every time you press the button, a screenshot is taken and automatically saved to your harddrive. To access them, from your Steam Library, right click Civ 5, then choose "view screenshots".
2. Without Steam
It's also possible to do this without using Steam, although an extra step will be needed. In Civ 5 you can press the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard to save your screen as a *.tga file in your "C:\Users\<User Name>\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\ScreenShots" folder by default. The trouble, however, is that *.tga files are not very accessible and certainly cannot be opened by an average, everyday web browser. To overcome this problem, you need to convert your TGA file into a better format (preferably, PNG format). There are many ways to do this, I will mention a couple:
1. Use Gimp. Download this from gimp.org. Open the file, save as PNG.
2. Use this website: http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-png
However, since you will have to do this for every single screenshot you take, it's a lot more troublesome.
That's it folks. I hope you will have fun posting screenshots of Alex getting beaten into a pulp by your awesome armies.
1. Steam method
If you are running Civ 5 via Steam, the Steam method is probably the better (and the easier) method. Steam provides a set of tools for generating and collecting screenshots taken for your Steam games, and USUALLY you can easily do so by pressing F12. Unfortunately, in Civ 5 F12 is bound as a shortcut for "loading last quicksave", so pressing F12 on Civ 5 will generally give you a black screen.
To my best knowledge, there are no easy way to rebind your F12 key to any other functions for Civ 5
mad. Therefore, you should consider rebinding your "taking screenshot" key for Steam. To do so, from your Steam window, to go Steam -> Settings, then for the In-Game tab, change the hotkey for taking screenshots from F12 to something else (I use "\"). Every time you press the button, a screenshot is taken and automatically saved to your harddrive. To access them, from your Steam Library, right click Civ 5, then choose "view screenshots".
2. Without Steam
It's also possible to do this without using Steam, although an extra step will be needed. In Civ 5 you can press the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard to save your screen as a *.tga file in your "C:\Users\<User Name>\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\ScreenShots" folder by default. The trouble, however, is that *.tga files are not very accessible and certainly cannot be opened by an average, everyday web browser. To overcome this problem, you need to convert your TGA file into a better format (preferably, PNG format). There are many ways to do this, I will mention a couple:
1. Use Gimp. Download this from gimp.org. Open the file, save as PNG.
2. Use this website: http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-png
However, since you will have to do this for every single screenshot you take, it's a lot more troublesome.
That's it folks. I hope you will have fun posting screenshots of Alex getting beaten into a pulp by your awesome armies.
