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This morning I am going to go in a different direction… and ask the Blaugust community with assistance on something.  For years I have been a loyal FRAPS user for the purpose of recording game screenshots.  I have a legally registered copy… that happens to have personal information in the registration details screen so I have mosaic’d it out.  There are an awful lot of pirated copies floating about but I happily plunked down my $40 and have been using it for over a decade at this point.  It has always simply worked as intended and given me the ability to record screenshots without fail.  This changed however when Destiny 2 made the weird decision to block any form of an overlay for “security reasons” there by making it so that FRAPS could not record anything successfully.

First I feel like I need to start off with why I use FRAPS rather than in game screenshot tools.  It all comes down to the fact that I like posting a significant number of screenshots in my morning posts…  and that I am lazy.  I cannot remember what the directory MMO number 376 that I have installed on my system uses for screenshot storage.  As a result I like having everything dumped into the same directory where I can filter through them quickly, and eventually archive them off to my network attached storage.  I have a truly nonsense number of screenshots stored out there at this point.

Ultimately what I am looking for feature wise…

• ability to capture fullscreen, borderless and windows screenshots without capturing the window frame or my desktop
• ability to save to the format of choice… I tend to dump things to JPG because my blog gets grumpy if I upload PNGs anymore
• ability to work flawlessly without having to constantly check to see if its on
• ability to change the target directory and dump everything to one place
• ability to bind whatever it is to work off of PrtScrn button because its habit

For years FRAPS did all of these things but one of the recent Windows 10 updates seems to have changed that.  Now any time I launch a game I need to kill FRAPS and relaunch it to get the overlay to work properly.  This means that it is now a fiddly mess and it makes me grumpy.  So what I am asking you my community is…  is there a hidden gem out there for screen capture that I am unaware of?  Now I am going to talk about some of the alternatives that I have used.

GeForce Experience

This one seemed like a no brainer given that I run Nvidia based cards and this ends up installing to your system regardless if you want it to.  It isn’t a flawless system but it was the only reliable way that I seemed to have to be able to record Destiny 2 given that the overlay is hardware based and not something executing at a software level.  Its major flaws were the fact that it would not dump to a single directory, but instead a series of directories named off of what the game executable thinks it is.  This causes some weirdness when the game developers don’t actually go back and fix the name of their executable… for example the Quake Champions screenshots I have are in a directory called “PC” or Dauntless for whatever reason shows up as “Archon” which was maybe an early name for the game?

Another flaw is that you cannot change what format the screenshots are dumped in as it always saves to PNG, which involved me going through a morning ritual of converting all of the screenshots that I was going to upload to JPG to bypass the nonsense size limit.  Lastly and quite possibly the most damning problem is when I happen to be running a game in windowed mode…  it records my entire desktop like the above screenshot.  This means I either need to drop it in photoshop and cut out the window or just live with the fact I am posting a postage stamp for a screenshot.  Not ideal to say the least given that when I am streaming I occasionally run things windowed so I can see what is going on in stream etc.

Dxtory

Another screenshot software that has been recommended to me numerous times is Dxtory by ExKode which is I believe a Japanese based software house.  It is also in the 30-40 dollar range price wise and does a really good job of capturing both images and video.  The problem is… it would occasionally just stop working and not give any indication of this.  I would be playing along thinking everything was working as intended… I would still have an overlay in game indicating that the software is active…  then when I sit down to write a blog post the next morning I would have zero screenshots to show for the previous nights play time.  The unreliable nature and the fact that this was not an every night occurrence made me move away from it.  Some times it would go for three or four nights without flaking out on me… and other times it would happen multiple times in the same night.  I was not able to find any sort of pattern around it.  Whatever the case however it was unreliable and I opted to move away from it.

Greenshot

This is an open source software mostly designed to capture regions of an image much like windows clipping tool.  However it does in fact have an unattended screenshot mode and as a result I attempted to use it as my software of choice for awhile.  The problem is that when running Windowed Borderless… it would intermittently alternate between taking a screenshot of my desktop and taking a screenshot of the game.  This became problematic given that I was missing a bunch of screenshots and again… maybe had nothing to show for my night of gaming come blog post time.

The core problem is that most of the screenshot tools don’t really do the thing that I want them to do given that they are largely focused on capturing video…  and not capturing still images.  I have StreamLabs OBS for those moments when I want to capture video so I have that covered.  However what I want instead is just a reliable screenshot tool that I can use with literally every game I play, so the images don’t get lost somewhere on my hard drive.  I may give Dxtory another spin because it has been numerous years since I last tried it.  Ultimately however what I really want… is FRAPS to stop being a butt and just work again.  In the meantime however, I would love to hear some of your suggestions for screenshotting games?  Do you still rely on the in game screenshot tools, or have you consolidated to using some tool other than the ones I have mentioned?

 

Last night I logged in a bunch of characters in a failed attempt to prepare for the impending apocalypse that is sure to come with today’s patch.  What I mean by that is the 7.0 patch nerfed the prices of a bunch of the garrison missions as well as the sales prices of a ton of the associated nonsense that comes with that sort of thing.  So last night I logged in and collected any gold missions I had waiting to be collected since I had not logged into WoW in a few weeks…  and sold all of the items used to upgrade followers that I had in my inventory.  While the servers are still up and running at this very moment the patching process has already started to our clients, and by the time I come home there will be a whole new era of World of Warcraft started.  I am still not entirely sure how I feel about this.

I don’t mean this post to sound as hyperbolic as I am sure it will come off as, but Legion was sort of a tipping point for me in many ways.  Blizzard showed me how good a design could feel that didn’t focus on the red versus blue nonsense but instead dug down hard into the class story-line and creating situations where all of us…  Horde and Alliance worked together to solve issues.  While I didn’t stick with it for the long haul, Legion is probably my new favorite expansion for World of Warcraft replacing the previous…  Wrath of the Lich King.  I had hope that we would see a new shining era of working together to fight the bigger baddies in the world, but instead what we got was a doubling down on the infighting and bullshit, and a path that looks to be setting up both Jaina and Sylvanas on a possible path towards becoming raid bosses.

My dream for World of Warcraft is a time when I can sit down and play with both my Horde and Alliance friends together, and this expansion seems to be putting a final nail in that concept.  As a result my interest in this game has never been at a lower point, and were it not for twitter and people talking about the 8.0 patch constantly I probably would not have known it was a thing.  While a lot of my friends were in a flurry of activity trying to finish out their mage tower challenges, attempting to beat all of them before they went away…  I find myself in a situation where I never did a single one.  The last expansion saw me going into it with one of every class Alliance side at maximum level…  this expansion sees me going into it with 2 warriors, 2 deathknights, a demon hunter and a paladin.

This expansion also sees me planning on switching my allegiance and “maining” horde this time around.  It is going to be a weird ride when in less than a month now the expansion launches.  I have deeply mixed feelings about my future with this game.  I’ve heard the “its world of warcraft, not world of peacecraft” nonsense so many times it makes me want to punch people through the internet.  I used to keep going because I had this nexus of hope deep down inside of me that someday somehow things would change and the faction wall would fall and I could finally unite both groups of friends living on either side of that chasm.  That hope has died, and with it a lot of the reasons why I kept playing the game.  That said I know I will give Battle for Azeroth a shot and probably even find myself enjoying certain aspects of it.  However the hope has mostly been replaced with Dread as I watch this Warbringers series seeming to make good on that concern that we might be losing one more more powerful characters to a Raid someday.

After patching my addons and logging into a bunch of characters…  and then the requisite amount of “oh look its bel” and answering a series of messages…  I eventually retreated back into my comfy space that is Elder Scrolls Online.  I sorta knew that I could only log in so many characters before someone noticed my presence and started trying to interact.  I mean this is more of a thing on the Alliance side where I have been gone far longer.  On Horde side I am mostly greeted with a “hi bel” since I tend to darken those doors fairly often.  House Stalwart was the guild that I built on the day the servers opened in World of Warcraft and for a long time it was my home.  However the game has changed and with it the guild has changed as a necessity to keep folks active and happy.  I don’t begrudge anything that Elnore, Rylacus or now Kylana did to keep things up and running and the tweaks they made to stay viable.

That said House Stalwart feels like returning to the small town you grew up in, years after leaving it…  and while the folks are friendly all you can notice is the things that have changed and the names that are no longer there.  That guild and the Alliance side of the house are fundamentally different now, and quite honestly are different from when the Legion expansion rolled out and I went through my last period of heavy activity and raiding.  To say active and relevant you have to be a guild in constant motion, whereas the older I get the more I seem to want things to stay the same.  As it stands, though I created it…  I identify more with Greysky Armada our FFXIV guild than I do with House Stalwart these days.  While the Elder Scrolls Online guild bears that name it bears way more connection to Greysky and the AggroChat community than it ever did the original World of Warcraft one.

I think ultimately so much has changed in my life and inside of me since 2004 when the doors opened to Azeroth.  What used to feel like family now feels like a foreign country.  I can’t really blame the game or the players…  it is me that changed because I kept leaving with increasing frequency to go elsewhere.  I remember my first “WoW Tourist” jaunt happened about six months after release, before I had even made it to level 60 on a single character.  A bunch of my friends went off to play Everquest 2 with the group of folks who didn’t follow us into World of Warcraft but instead chose that path.  I remember doing this again for Warhammer Online and quite frankly every major MMO release seemed to pull me away from Warcraft for a period of time…  until those periods of time got longer than my actual time playing the game.

While this image is greatly outdated at this point… you can see this constant string of orange squares at the top to represent time spent playing World of Warcraft.  The only problem with that is it is a lie, and a lot of those interactions are time spent subscribed and poking my head back in for a night here or there and not large blocks of dedicated time.  I left the game during the early days of the Cataclysm expansion prior to the first patch, and in truth I never fully returned to feeling the same way about it as I did back then.  Sure I have come back with each expansion and usually become active again just prior to a new patch…  but that orange bar is evidence of a lot of time spent moonlighting in World of Warcraft but not actually playing it as my primary game.  I have some deeply complicated feelings about my inability to let go of the past and just move on, and a lot of those feelings have come to a head recently as I stare down the barrel of this expansion.

Sorry for what probably ended up being a bummer of a post, but occasionally I cannot predict the post that will come forth from my fingertips on a given morning.

First I feel like I need to start this mornings post off with a discussion of how completely overwhelmed I am by the birthday wishes yesterday.  We were travelling and each time we stopped I furiously tried to catch up with personal thanks to everyone who sent me something.  I completely missed Facebook unfortunately because I refuse to install the Facebook app on my phone and wound up doing a sort blanket thanks over there when I got home.  Twitter however is my social media of choice and I tried my best to keep up throughout the day.  I think I successfully thanked each and every one of you…  but given how fast everything was scrolling there is a high chance that I missed someone.  If I did I am truly sorry because I am super thankful for all of the awesome friends I have.

For the last several years my wife and I have been doing this little mini vacation to the Kansas City metro.  As the rockstar teacher she is, she signs up to grade the AP Statistics exams…  and for the last several years has been a table leader that is responsible for making sure that all of the essay questions get graded effectively the same way by all teachers.  For those who are having trouble picturing this…  imagine a convention center filled with tables full of teachers… all of them grading essays for eight hours a day in a sort of weird factory type environment.  That is what my wife has been doing for the last week and some change.

Instead of having the AP Board fly her back home I have been driving up on the day she gets released and picking her up.  Then we run around Kansas City that night and the next morning and drive back to Tulsa.  Because we are lame we mostly just hit a bunch of the Half Priced Books stores there and usually the Microcenter since we don’t have one in Tulsa and pretty much anything else that happens to suit our fancy in the journey.  That means as the birthday wishes are rolling in we are usually moving from location to location with me trying to catch up as we go.

I tend to tweet out random things I encounter… like yesterday I made a joke about these being apparently the Amiibos that did not sell, given they were at a Five Below in Olathe KS.  Later I found out that no… these are fairly rare and were Amazon exclusives and who knows how they ended up in the secondary market.  I wished I had picked up a couple because various folks like Pizzamaid really want the Palutena one.  You can find a bunch of odd things that show up at Five Below, which is a discount chain that I wish we had in my area.  The Below part is generally a lie because I’ve seen very few things there that are cheaper than $5.

Another weird thing I stumbled across in my journey was this controller at Microcenter.  There was no way I was going to pay the $70 price tag but I did snap a photo because I thought it was interesting.  Once I got back to civilization I looked it up and apparently it is the Emio 5-in-1 switch controller, but based on the reviews from Amazon it is not a phenomenal product.  Apparently the Switch 5.0 update completely broke this controller like it did so many third party peripherals, but it was an interesting idea with swappable button layouts for the different Nintendo control schemes it is trying to emulate.

Anyways this is one of those rambling nothing posts.  I feel like I should suddenly feel wiser today given that I am not forty two and apparently the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.  Unfortunately I don’t feel much different apart from the fact I woke up this morning with an insane headache.  I remember as a kid anytime I would go through growth spurts my joints would hurt.  I wonder if headaches are just a sign of your mind going through a growth spurt too.  Personally I like that thought better than the alternative explanations.