Question about screenshots
CharlestonianTemplar
Member Posts: 855
I hope this is the correct area to ask this question. If not, can someone redirect me?
Suddenly yesterday, all of my screenshots of my game are black. If I take a screenshot of something else, they come out fine.
I'm on Windows 10 and the black images are coming out as .png. Two days ago, my screen shots were coming out fine. Any help is appreciated.
I called Microsoft but they punted me because the other screenshots I am taking are clear, so they say it's an issue with the game. I may have jacked up a setting or something.
Thanks, CT
Suddenly yesterday, all of my screenshots of my game are black. If I take a screenshot of something else, they come out fine.
I'm on Windows 10 and the black images are coming out as .png. Two days ago, my screen shots were coming out fine. Any help is appreciated.
I called Microsoft but they punted me because the other screenshots I am taking are clear, so they say it's an issue with the game. I may have jacked up a setting or something.
Thanks, CT
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Like I said, two days ago it was working fine, darnit.
Could the game be taking it's own screenshot at some random time during the loading screens and only pushing to the windows clipboard upon the taking of a new screenshot?
I have to go to Graphics and deselect, Full Screen. Then I am able to take a shot of the smaller screen - which, luckily doesn't bring in all the other desktop stuff outside of the Baldur's Gate pic I'm trying to capture... so you get a clear screen capture.
It's annoying, but it works.
Still, I don't know what happened, two days ago it was doing fine on full screen mode.
Thanks again for checking into it. CT
Windows keeps track of positions of every window, and what is on their screen. In general this is updated whenever it detects something has changed - you move/resize the window, something changes on the screen (not counting mouse position), etc. Then, when you press printscreen, it creates the screenshot from this internal data that it has. This works perfectly for "regular programs".
For most games it works good as well, because most games on windows are drawn using DirectX/Direct3D, which will notify the internal window manager that the screen changes, and Windows will know where to source the image from when needed.
NWN, however uses OpenGL - it is an open standard that does the same thing as DirectX. Microsoft is not a fan of opengl and doesn't really offer a reliable and simple way for opengl programs to provide the same feature.
From a Microsoft point of view, the issue is with NWN because it does not use the recommended tools, i.e. DirectX. From a NWN point of view, the issue is with MSFT because they don't fully support an open standard. From a player point of view, they don't care, they just want their screenshots
Now, whether or not it actually works depends on a few other things in Windows, but as it is not a priority for Microsoft to make this work, any update might break it as they don't really test it.
The old NWN used to bypass this by hijacking the "print screen" event, and just rendering one frame of the game to a file instead of the screen. I'm not sure this happens anymore.
To solve, you can do:
a) if using steam, steam exposes an alternative printscreen command (I think F12 by default) that you can use.
b) Do something to force Windows to read the state. Such as moving/resizing the window if in Windowed mode, or alt-tabbing. Now when you take a screenshot, you'll take a shot of the state when you alt-tabbed, not when you pressed prtscr.
Hope this explains it. There are ways NWN can work around this limitation, but they might not be simple. Feel free to request it as a feature and upvote on trello to signal that it is something you'd want to be worked on.
Wow. Thank you for taking the time to lay that out. I'd try to do, 'B' but I'm not sure I understand. It sounds sorta like the workaround I discovered, which is to deselect Fullscreen under graphics. If I take printscreen in that mode it delivers the capture without the surrounding desktop so it's a clear shot. Not sure with regard to your suggestion what you mean by 'alt-tab'. I use that to minimize the game and go to other programs all the time but not sure how that would help (I'm a knucklehead).
Let me take a crack at resizing the window - I actually DO think that has something to do with it - the window almost seems too big for Windows 'to get it's arms around' if that makes sense.
I am using the game from Beamdog's client (not Steam), and I have a high-speed, wicked fast, gaming computer that I recently purchased - not sure I'm licensed to drive this thing.
Thanks again friend - and @Grond0 for clarifying. CT