Printscreen in SMAX

[Hydro]

Can someone refresh my memory on how to do screenshots with SMAC? When I try hit Printscreen, exit SMAC, and the paste (^V) to the XP Paint program all I get is black with some lettering.

Thx,
Hydro

[Maniac]

Set colours to something better than 256?

[Hydro]

I don't think that is the problem since Printscreen with paste to Paint works fine for other games (GalCiv2) or of my desktop.

I'll try a few more times. Maybe I just was a bit unfortunate.

Hydro

[Blake]

Set colors to anything better than 256.

It's a quirk of SMAC that it sets color depth to 256 and a custom palette which messes with windows. Another quirk is that changing the color depth (after SMAC has loaded) doesn't screw up SMAC.

While changing the color depth is certainly the easiest way I think there's another method. I think you might have to load the paint program AFTER starting SMAC, and save the screenshot before quitting. That makes sure the palette stuff is captured correctly. But setting the color depth to > 256 is the generally easiest way.

[Hydro]

OK. How do I set color depth? I don't see anything like that in XP Paint. Or is it in Control Panel?

Hydro

[Hydro]

OK. I tried again, and this time tabbed out of SMAX. When I pasted to XP Paint I got a strange color inverted image.

So then exited SMAX, then pasted to a new sheet, and it worked!

Very quirky. Blake, I think you're right about some strange color palate. I'll play some more...

Hydro

[Blake]

Generally in order to change the color depth the easiest way is to have a utility on your windows task bar and use the right-click nenu, NVIDIA settings or equivalent for your graphics card.

Otherwise have the windows "Display Settings" open before starting SMAX, or open it from the control panel (usually you open display settings by right-clicking on desktop but that obviously doesn't work with SMAX loaded).

[Hydro]

Well, Printscreen, converting to JPG and URL it's working fine.

Here is the first image from my PBEM 15 SMAnican AAR:



It got cropped in an odd way, but it will do.

Thx!
Hydro

[vyeh]

With the boreholes touching each other, I assume the map was not randomly generated ...

What does AAR stand for?

[Blake]

The borehole cluster is a landmark and for that landmark the boreholes are allowed to touch.

AAR stands for After Action Report.

[Xian]

make sure that DirectDraw=0 in your alphacentauri.ini