In Search of Screenshots

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This mornings post is going to be a bit of a descent into my madness. One of the things you will have no doubt noticed by now on my blog is that I post a lot of screenshots. It has become a bit of an obsession to have a decent workflow for taking a screenshot from a moment in a game to a properly sized image ready for posting. One of the problems I have encountered over the years is that every single game seems to want to store its screenshots in a different arcane location. While there are websites like the PC Gaming Wiki that can help you decode this nonsense, there are even more games that have no built in screenshot functionality.

My desire is to ultimately have every screenshot that I take land in a single incoming directory, where I can then process and eventually (often times months and months later) sort it into my long network storage. I need to reorganize but I have some rough break downs by game type and then store my images in a directory loosely named off of the game title. The benefit of this is that I can rapidly pull back a screenshot for a game that I have not been playing in ages if I end up needing/wanting to talk about it again. I play an excessive number of games so having some sort of a system helps greatly in trying to decipher this mess.

For years… and I do mean like a decade or so… I used FRAPS. It was the swiss army knife of PC screenshotting tools, and was relatively lightweight in a sort of set it and forget it manner. I configured it to dump into my “gameshots” directory and the rest was history. I could reclaim the fruits of my labor from that location and then convert them as needed for the purpose of the blog. The core problem with this is that FRAPS and Beepa the company behind it… are effectively defunct. Sure you can still purchase licenses for it, but it has not been updated since 2013 and has had a slew of issues starting with Windows 8.1 and continuing with Windows 10.

This lead me down a path that ultimately lead to DXtory at the suggestion of a friend. This application works fairly well… except when it doesn’t and for whatever reason keeps your game from even launching. Anthem for example… will not launch while DXtory is running and I am guessing this has something to do with the way that it is hooking into Direct X as an overlay and it being detected by Anti-Cheat software as somewhat of an aberration. The other issue that I would occasionally run into with DXTory is that it would just stop working out of the blue, and would not start working again until I rebooted. The final nail in the coffin unfortunately is once again DXtory seems to be a bit of an abandonware project given that the last update was in 2017 and the game has numerous unresolved issues.

Another tool that I have used quite a bit is GeForce Experience and its in-game overlay which provides access to taking screenshots and video. This works when it works… and stops working seemingly randomly. There are games that this will capture like a champ, and it has the added benefit of dumping them into a directory named after the information in the games executable. However it was unreliable enough that there were many nights where I thought I was capturing all of this content for the blog… and then get out of the game only to realize I got nothing. Additionally this does not play nicely with Parsec all of the time, which lead to some weirdness that could occasionally cause me to lose mouse input controls while remoted into my upstairs machine.

Greenshot is an open source screenshotting tool that seemed promising. However it has a massive flaw that ultimately drove me away from it. There were many a night when I would be humming along taking screenshots, only to realize later that for whatever reason it was not capturing the game but instead just picture after picture of my desktop. This caused a rapid uninstall and a retreat back into other tools.

Steam has a perfectly cromulent Screenshot functionality, that seems to work flawlessly. It has two fatal flaws as far as I am concerned. The first being that you cannot change where the screenshots are stored and they are stored in a truly arcane path that I die inside a little bit each time I remember that I have memorized it. “Steam\userdata\8795056\760\remote\1085660\screenshots” for example is the directory for Destiny 2, which is a game that is notoriously hard to nab screenshots from with a third party tool. The only bit that is unique to Destiny is the “1085660” which I believe is some kind of Steam Catalog Identifier. I’ve had to rely on this for Destiny for awhile given that neither Fraps nor DXTory were capable of pulling a screenshot. The final flaw however is the fact that this only works for games running under Steam… which is not a case for every game I play.

When I shared this lament with folks online… the almost universal refrain was “What about OBS?”. The thing is… I don’t want to capture video. OBS is my go to for any time I want to capture footage or that I might want to stream, and I use it at work for manipulating my web cam before piping it through video conference software. The problem for me at least is that while OBS does support screenshot functionality, it feels like a lot of overhead to be running this window of OBS that is constantly mirroring my screen just to be recording a still. Then there is the problem with Medal or any of the other “record clips” apps, that they are really focused on live video. Pulling a still from video is messy and often times ends up with anything that was in action being blurred as a result because video doesn’t record full single frames but instead a mishmash that visually works in motion.

Where we have ended up is another piece of software that a friend suggested. ShareX, like Greenshot is also an OpenSource project but it seems to be designed around capturing anything you might want to capture. It has a whole workflow system, which I have only barely scratched and was seemingly designed for the purpose of taking an image and then uploading image to some external host. I am not doing that second part, but I am wondering if I can eventually script it so that it does my entire workflow. Right now I have everything dumping into a single directory, but it seems like I could pretty easily recreate the functionality that GeForce Experience did and name things based on the executable information. So far it “just works” and it has even managed to flawlessly capture Destiny 2, with the caveat being that you have to be running it as Administrator or some games seem to block it.

I’ve been using it for about a week now and everything that I have attempted to capture has been great without any weirdness that I have encountered thusfar. I am hoping that I might have a winner here, and pending that I do I will happily start contributing to the Patreon as a way of funding this thing that is seemingly really hard to find. I have zero qualms supporting the things I used and had licenses to FRAPS, DXTory and even the thing I am going to talk about next… IrfanView. Ultimately I need to dig into the workflow scripting because once I get an image in the incoming directory, that isn’t the end of the process.

I’ve used IrfanView since college for batch image processing, and before that I used something called Graphics Workshop. IrfanView is this awesome one size fits all image viewer software that has plugins to support all sorts of esoteric other formats. The final step before an image ends up on my blog is to run it through a batch conversion where it makes sure the size constrains to at least 1920×1080 (it ignores anything smaller) and then converts it to a JPG to reduce the size. My native resolution is 3840×2160 aka “4k” and I have no interest in posting something that large on my blog. However I do like storing the original image capture for any future needs down the line. As a result I everything gets run through IrfanView which also moves the screenshot to its final resting place signifying that it is ready to post on the blog.

I am hoping that ShareX stays with me for awhile. So far I have yet to encounter a game that it would not capture. I need to spend some time learning about its functionality because I am using it for only a fraction of what it seems to be able to do. If it could replace my entire workflow it would be phenomenal, so that it could save a copy in Full Resolution and then send a scaled down copy to my working directory as well. I know this is probably madness but I feel like it is useful every so often to peel back the curtain and talk about how I approach things.

Getting Beidou Too Late

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Good morning everyone. I hope you had a most excellent weekend. I spent the majority of mine playing Genshin Impact. If you have not tried this game out you really should given how much of my time it has been eating up… and subsequently how many of my friends have also become more than a little obsessed. I am a little slap happy at the moment because I was woken up by work at 3 am and felt like I never could get back to sleep properly after that point. I am sure there will be a point during the day where I require copious amounts of caffeine. I feel like I didn’t actually make a ton of progress over the weekend, but looking back on Friday’s it seems I did. That post had me just dinging AR20, and at this point I am about halfway through AR26.

Grace and I made several attempts at the various world bosses, and I think at this point the only one that I have not taken down is the Geo Cube thingy. We actually spent some time on Saturday morning farming bosses, which is a significant leap from where we were originally in struggling to get them down. I am not sure if it is a gearing and level thing or if we just now better understand the fights… or a little of column a and column b. Whatever the case I was super thankful at having learned at least one of the fights because low and behold one appeared in the level 25 trial that allows you to progress past that point… and I had to fight it on a timer. I won’t say which, but maybe spend some time doing the fights before you get to that level.

Another thing that I took care of was getting the Spiral Abyss through Floor 3-3 which unlocked a free Xiangling, or in my case one of her constellations. I did not unfortunately get enough points on Floor 3 in order to move on to Floor 4 so at some point I will return and focus on the elemental affix in the hope of getting a faster clear and a few more points. Spiral Abyss is likely going to be a great place to farm artifacts, but for the time being it is mostly just a bunch of blue fodder. I need to spend some time straightening out my gear so that I can safely start using blues as infusion fuel for weapons and artifacts. I still have not gathered up a full set of 4 star purple artifacts for any of my characters, but I have a wide enough assortment so that multiple characters have one or two of them.

Yesterday was the last day of the login bonus, and I gotta admit I feel a little sad seeing it go. I had hoped that it would be something like Dragalia Lost where it just seems to keep rolling forward each day that you log in. Instead I can confirm that you only get seven days worth of free gifts before it ultimately peters out. I still seem to keep getting a daily allotment of 160 primogems by mail which is incidentally enough to do one free summon each day. I kinda dig the way it is handling the currency where as in Dragalia Lost you were given free summon tokens, and here instead you can use the primogems for other purposes if you don’t feel like summoning anything.

The thing that I really need to focus on are the backlog of quests that I have gathered up. Once I hit AR20 it seemed a significant number of world quests started popping up all over the place. Each time I encountered one I would grab it and then promptly go about my business of doing other things. You have to understand, my natural state is wandering and exploring in games and I had to train myself to focus on questing for leveling purposes in games like World of Warcraft. In theory if I complete all of these quests I have backed up I will surely shoot up in Adventurer Rank very quickly. I am shocked however that this far into the game I am still finding things that I missed in the first areas.

The only real negative right now is occasionally I will pull a cool new character, like Beidou here but I don’t feel like I can really devote the resources to catching her up. All of the guides that I read or watched ahead of the launch told me to focus on only one or two characters. I have avoided this good advice and have instead focused on a huge smattering of characters. Right now my regular rotation includes: The Traveler, Razor, Kaeya, Amber, Barbara, Noelle, and Venti. They all get some attention and I attempt to keep them at least ascended to the next tier. What I really wish is that this game had something akin to the Pokemon Party XP system, because while I am not certain about it… it seems like the only character getting XP is the one actively killing things.

All of that said I am still completely enthralled by the game and all of the weird and wonderful things it contains. Why is there a cut up fish out on an island in the middle of nowhere? Who knows! There are few games that I have played where I enjoy venturing off the beaten path nearly as much as I have with Genshin Impact. It feels like there are so many secrets yet to find, and when I reach a point where I finally have… I know there is a brand new map opening up on the near horizon. If they can maintain a good release cadence there will in theory be always something new to find in this game. For now I am just happy to piddle around and do my own thing.

AggroChat #317 – Go Barbara Go

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Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Nephsys, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we have an extra long show, because we tried to limit it down to three topics…  but still had too much to say to fit within the normal allotted hour.  This week we also have bonus friend Nephsys as we talk about Genshin Impact and how it came seemingly out of nowhere and conquered many of our lives.  From there we talk about Star Wars Squadrons and how it seems to be the Star Wars Starfighter game that Tam had been waiting for.  Finally we wrap up with some more discussion of Hades as many escape attempts have been made.  This time around we talk about more specific strategy and player experiences.

Topics Discussed:

  • The Importance of Inverted Y
  • Genshin Impact
    • How is this game this good?
  • Star Wars Squadrons
    • Tam gets his Star Wars Flight Sim on
    • Not Arcade Enough for Bel
  • Hades
    • Many Escapes This Week
    • The marvels of Design

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Genshin Co-Op and World Bosses

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It has been a very Genshin Impact week, and to be truthful right now it has my full attention. At first it was in order to get to Adventure Rank 20 and get the free Barbara healer character. Now it is just because it is extremely freaking fun, and it happens to be the game that I want to play the most. I am sure the new will wear thin at some point, but for right now I am happiest when roaming the world and looking for interesting things to explore. There are still areas of Mondstadt that I have yet to see and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the much larger Liyue.

Last night Grace and I got in sync and decided to explore how exactly Co-Op works in this game. For starters you can in fact join the game of another player and wander around in the open world. This could serve very useful for helping your friends out when they are working on puzzles and such. It effectively splits the party so each player controls two characters. The weird part is that the joining player can’t really interact with the world, like opening chests or interacting with objects in dungeons. However everything that drops seems to spawn an instanced copy for both players. That means if you mine an ore node, both players get their own copies of whatever pops out of them. The same is true with any in world kills, and the one exception to the no interaction bit seems to be when you would need to spend resin to open something.

We spent some time trying to figure out something meaningful to do with our time. The domains that we had access to were completely trivialized with two players. We couldn’t quite figure out a way to may trails or the spiral abyss work co-op which was unfortunate. Eventually we settled into taking on some world bosses and this is absolutely the best use of time with other players. We started with probably the hardest, the Cryo Regisvine but after a couple of attempts we managed to down it. After that we moved on and took down the Electro Hypostasis which was pretty easy, and finally moved to the Anemo Hypostasis which gave us a bit more trouble but was doable as well. The negative is that these bosses cost 40 resin each… the positive however is they drop a bunch of stuff… most of it we have no clue how to use yet.

Opening up at 20 was the battle pass, and considering how much I have been enjoying this game I absolutely paid the $20 to unlock both tracks. All of the shenanigan’s we had been doing throughout the night seemingly counted towards the unlocking of ranks. It seems like the game is secretly crediting you for your activities before you reach Rank 20 and then letting you cash those in when you get access to the Battle Pass system. I’m currently level 12 and this also serves like the Adventure’s Journal in giving me something to focus on for the time when I am not doing structured content. For example I need to find more secrets in each of the two areas, but I am pretty close to unlocking another bunch of BP experience for Mondstadt.

Additionally at 20, I unlocked Barbara which had been the focus of my recent leveling push. Grace ran with her last night and I was able to see just how much passive healing she is capable of dishing out. I love Razor, but he is a bit squishier than I would like him to be so it might be nice to swap in Barbara in that last slot to swap over to periodically to passively heal up the party with her attacks. It is somewhat unfortunate however that you can’t really heal your characters without going into combat, but shredding a Hilichurl camp while paying Barbara effectively will top off the entire party and prepare for them for the next big engagement.

I find myself still having a blast with this game and I cannot wait to talk about it on AggroChat this weekend. It is just so surreal because this is absolutely a game that came from out of nowhere for me. I had heard about it but I largely filed this away as a mobile only experience, and since in general I don’t love playing games where I have to mimic a controller with on screen thumbsticks I ignored it. I hope that maybe just maybe something like this convinces other mobile games to give creating a PC client a shot. I’ve played a few of them with Android emulators like Nox Player or Blue Stacks and with Keyboard and Mouse they were a much more enjoyable experience.

I hope you have a glorious weekend. What do you have on your gaming schedule for the next few days? Are you also obsessed with Genshin Impact? Drop me a line in the comments.