Automatic Screenshots

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I talked about how I wished there was a tool out there that would just take screenshots at key moments for me. I get deeply engaged and in a focused state… and forget to mash the screenshot key. Then there are moments where I am actively fighting and think a screenshot might be cool… but it is inconvenient to break the action and try and capture it. So instead what I posited is something sitting there in the background snapping a screenshot every minute or so, and then later I could review these and cull the dross. I think largely I landed on something that works for me in this fashion and while I hinted at it yesterday, I am going to talk a bit more about it today after having played with it.

I’ve been using an open-source program called ShareX since 2020 to record my screenshots. I like its default structure of naming the files based on the program that is actively in use and then dumping them into monthly directories. This works well for me other than on the first of the next month… when I seem to forget that I will need to start looking in a new directory. It is extremely flexible and even offers the ability to upload screenshots as part of the capture process. I’ve turned all of that off and I largely just use the “Capture Active Window” task hotkey. However, I noticed that I had available to me a “Start Auto Capture Using Last Region” option which will turn on the auto capture dialog to the left and minimize it. In order to turn it off you have to click through to your system tray pop up that window and hit stop. However what it does amazingly well… is just start working and do so seamlessly in the background until I am ready for it to stop working.

I did have to configure some overrides specific to that hotkey, and you can access those by clicking on the gear next to the hotkey that I configured. Namely, I needed to change the file naming structure because the default option was simply not granular enough for my needs naming the files a sequence of letters: A, B, C, etc. The other thing that I needed to do was manually kick off the auto-capture functionality and set it to full screen. The default seemed to be “region capture” which was capturing both of my monitors at the same time which is not useful at all. I removed the %pn from the beginning of the file name because for fullscreen captures it is not able to determine what program it is capturing. I wish there was an option to have it capture the active window, but it works well enough for what it does do.

So last night while I was running maps and done delve, I had it sitting in the background quietly snapping a screenshot every minute. This allowed me to capture some really interesting screenshots of skill effects firing off. For example, I was getting attacked by some sort of lightning attack it seems like and you can see my Toxic Rain falling as well as I was clearing my way through a Crimson Temple map. I never could have captured a moment in time with quite so much clarity as I would have effectively had to stop what I was doing, hit the print screen key, and then go back to attempting combat.

It also captured a good number of completely useless screenshots of me futzing with my inventory. The normal process of me running content is to fill up my inventory, then port to my hideout and dump said inventory before diving back in again. This means that I have a fair number of photos of me showing my inventory in various states of being unloaded.

There were enough cool screenshots though that I think this is going to be how I handle this going forward. For example, it caught a pack in mid-explosion down in delve which looks freaking sweet. Really at the end of the day, this gave me what I really wanted. While it would be cool if it actively triggered specific events going on in the game, I am more than happy to just have random shots at regular intervals.

As far as gaming goes… I spent a good chunk of last night clearing out this massive Vaal City Complex with about a dozen city nodes and a Vaal boss. Then down to the left I found another smaller Abyssal City complex with five nodes and a Lich Boss encounter. I also ran a lot of maps on the Toxic Rain Pathfinder to fuel delve and while doing so I was swapping out at the end of each map to run Crucible with Righteous Fire which is just better at dealing with massive amounts of damage. This provided a truly ridiculous number of Heist missions which I burned through to get the quest items out of my inventory. It legitimately was an almost perfect night of hanging out on the sofa, playing Path of Exile, and snuggling with Josie and Gracie. Josie was curled up beside me and Gracie laying on my legs.

I am legitimately not sure if this auto-screenshot thing is going to be of use to anyone else, but I certainly think it works well for my purposes. If you go down this path I would certainly be interested in hearing about your exploits.

Random Screenshots #4

This morning is one of those mornings when I am super thankful that I cobbled together the random screenshot tool.  Last night I sort of failed at doing any measure of directed content.  I tuned into Spiral’s stream as she continued to push forward into Final Fantasy V and spent most of the night alt tabbing between twitch and Final Fantasy XIV.  I’ve been on this mission to make sure that I complete the Ixal quests each day, and they take significantly longer than your average quest.  In truth the bulk of the slowdown is all of the swapping back and forth between classes and having to craft items over and over until I get X number of high quality baubles for the turn in.  Sometimes I just get unlucky, and the higher crafting gets the harder this seems to be.  So while I might only need 4 items for the turn in… I might end up with a stack of 15 normal quality items that I had to craft to get those four HQs.  Needless to say when I finally finished up with the quests it was around 9 pm last night… and I was feeling largely done with Final Fantasy XIV for the night.  So instead I popped into the bedroom where I have my Wii U connected and played some more Zelda.  It is growing on me, but I still find a lot about the game frustrating, or at least non-intuitive.  As a result I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, and definitely no screenshots so… once again I crawl back into the vault and do a random sort.

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Chua Starting Area – Wildstar

While I may have issues with Wildstar… it will always be a gorgeous game.  This is I believe a screenshot from the tail end of Crimson Isle, the Chua/Draken starting zone.  There are times I miss my little Chua, and I went so far as to create a new one awhile back as a Warrior.  The problem is the game of Wildstar itself just never quite clicks.  There is just too much going on visually for me, and the style of targeted directional abilities with hotbar combat never seems to feel as good as I think they hoped it would.  I feel like the game would feel a lot better on a console where you can bind your main attacks to the triggers and bumpers and control movement and aiming with both analog sticks.  In theory you could emulate this… but keyboard to controller emulators never quite work as flawlessly as if you set the controls up for that purpose out of the box.  Just like running a console with a mouse and keyboard…  you are trying to fake out the hardware while using out another control scheme under the hood.

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Funny thing that I get a World of Warcraft image in this search because I really have not talked about the game lately much.  I am admittedly on a bit of a break right now, and in part I am simply just not forcing myself to log in when I don’t really want to.  For three or four weeks the real world got in the way of my raiding… and then I just got out of the habit of logging in regularly.  As it stands I have this meeting on Wednesdays that usually lets out about 6pm which leaves me an hour to get home.. find food and log into the game for the raid which is simply too rushed for my tastes.  So for the moment I am on extended leave, until the spirit drives me to start playing again.  This image is from me finding the Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker… aka the Protection Warrior alternate appearance.  This is probably the moment in Legion when I was playing the most intently, and every single day I made a trek out here to see if the shield was up.  The day it finally was… I took lots of screenshots and I so happily used this appearance until I got something newer unlocked recently.  The Legion launch and the first few patch cycles will always be a happy memory… even if I have sort of fallen out of the habit of playing the game.

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Another happy moment in a game… at the end of a long grind is when I finally got Turquoise on my Chocobo in Final Fantasy XIV.  For those who are unfamiliar… your base Chocobo can be dyed through an insane process of feeding the chocobo various fruits.  What makes the process maddening is that one set of fruit alters the RGB values… and another set of fruit seemed to instead alter CMYK.  When we first started doing this it was largely trial and error before the calculators came out… and even when they existed it never really was an exact science.  At the time we were doing this… the fruit for dyeing was prohibitively expensive.  While we were trying to keep an active stock of seeds growing in the garden… it never quite met up with the desires.  If you find yourself interested in this process, check out this calculator because it seems to be the best.  I remember towards the end I teetered back and forth between three colors until it finally clicked and gave me the Turquoise that I was hunting for.  All of this…  was simply to make sure that it matched my Leviathan Barding.

Random Screenshots #3

This is another one of those mornings when I feel like I don’t have much of anything to talk about.  Work encroached upon my gaming time, first with a meeting that I did not get out of until 6 pm…  when I normally get out of the office around 4/4:30.  Second when I did get home I had a bunch of things that I needed to look into given that we are still ironing out the issues with a brand new website launch.  As a result by the time I finished up I largely just crashed on the sofa and watched some Black Mirror as I had not touched season 3.  That show is extremely creepy, but also something that I cannot really stop watching.  It is a sort of technological tales of the crypt, and if you have never watched the show…  be prepared for some disturbing content.  That said it is still very much worth your time and the latest season has at least one gem scattered among the digital nightmares in the form of the San Junipero episode.  Anyways this morning is going to be a random screenshot post morning because I am not sure what else to really talk about.  I am still fairly groggy and probably shouldn’t have finished the 4th episode last night, and instead just headed on to bed.

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I am not entirely certain of the context, but this is of course a screenshot from Wildstar.  I believe it is from the moon mission where you have to figure out what happened to all of the miners.  Even though I have long struggled to really click with this game, I cannot deny how much of an interesting vision it really is.  The art direction was on point and everything feels like it exists in the same shared technicolor delusion.  For whatever reason I never really liked how spastic their flavor of hotbar combat felt.  Most recently I paid a little money to be able to create a Chua Warrior and I found it enjoyable…  but still not really clicking as hard as I would have liked.  Honestly this game and Guild Wars 2 sort of exist in the same space for me…  where they are equally interesting to visit but not exactly the same of place I want to call home.  I will say though that the people who do play the game regularly are amazing and I am super happy to have a whole bunch of them occupying my social media streams.  This is one of those games that I root hard for…  just from a distance.

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We go from a game that I don’t really get fully, to one that I absolutely do…  but still don’t end up playing that often.  I believe this screenshot is from one of the opening shots of Makeb which was the sequence of content I last played during a December 2015 binge of the game thanks to Force Awakens Star Wars hype.  I honestly thought I would similarly return during the Rogue One hype machine but it never actually materialized.  I realize I am missing so much great content, and I keep saying that one of these days when I hit a lull in whatever other games I happen to be playing that I will swoop back to Star Wars the Old Republic and gobble up all of the goodies I have missed.  I still have yet to start any of the Shadow of Revan content…  let alone Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne.  I did have an active sub, but I let that lapse at some point…  they keep roping me in with offers of “subs get X shiny bauble” and then I never actually end up playing.  I should in theory pop back in before this last bit of sub time lapses and I am stuck playing in freemium hell.

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On to yet another game that I have really fond memories of but never end up playing.  This is I believe a screenshot from one of the betas for The Secret World.  To the best of my knowledge this was me creating my very first character.  To be truthful I never was a huge fan of the character creation system in TSW, as it always felt like I never could create exactly the character that I wanted to create.  However on so many levels I loved this game, but the biggest problem is attempting to return to it.  Since you can repeat almost every quest it becomes extremely hard to see just what you have completed and what is new and something you should focus on.  When they release an issue I find it hard to actually track down all of the things that have been added and given that I last actively played during “Last Train to Cairo” which was issue number six… and they are currently on fifteen there is a ton of content I have missed.  I just find it extremely hard to get back into the game after being gone for so long…  and given all of the systems that they have seemingly loosely tacked onto the base experience.

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I don’t have an awful lot to say about this screenshot other than I thought it looked cool, so I decided to post it.  This is of course from Farcry 3 Blood Dragon, which is this insane 80s movie romp.  If you took every 80s sci-fi film and distilled it to its campy roots, then dumped all of that pure essence in a blender…  you wind up with Blood Dragon.  If you have never checked it out, you probably really should given that it regularly dips down into the $5 territory.  It is a completely stand alone experience and does not require Farcry…  nor does it really have anything to do with the Farcry Franchinse at all other than modeling some of the open world roaming gameplay.