I've put this together for anyone that has wanted to take
a pic of a fierce battle, a field of slain enemy's or just a simple picture of your
character. Taking a screenshot is fairly simple and there are many ways to go about it.
I'm going to describe two ways here that everyone should be able to do. The first deals
with Windows' Paint program. The second involves downloading a program to do the screen
capture.
Method I
This is a very simple screen capture process.
1. Make sure that you have M.S.Paint installed. You can
find it in the start menu under Programs|Accessories. If you don't have it you can install
it by going to the control panel|Add/Remove Programs.
2. Start Ultima Online. Once in the game all you need to
do is press the Print Screen key on the keyboard and the entire screen will be captured to
the clipboard.
3. After you have the screenshot that you want, ALT+ENTER
to reduce the screen size of Ultima or quit the game if you are no longer playing. Start
the M.S. Paint program.
4. Inside M.S.Paint press CTRL+V to
insert the image from the clipboard. The entire screen that you captured will now appear
in the main window of the paint program. Now save the image as 24bit bitmap. Your done!
The downside to this method is that the file that is
created is usually pretty big. An average screen shot will be often be over a meg in size.
Method II
This method involves downloading a screen capture program.
There are many programs available that are capable of
taking screen shots. I have chosen to use Hyper Snap for this example. If you don't have
it you can download it from any site listed here: HYPERSNAP
1. Start the Hypersnap Program. Select the feature: Enable
DirectX and GLIDE capture. This is located under the Capture menu.
2. Start Ultima. While in game a Screen Capture can be
taken by pressing the Print Screen button. While in full screen you will not notice any
effect taking place, but the current screen will be captured to HyperSnap's main window.
3. ALT+ENTER out of full screen mode in
UO or quit the program, and go to the HyperSnap window. You should now see your captured
screen in its window. Click on the Save button (image of a disk). A window will come up
asking what you wish to save the image as. Choose a name for the picture, then choose the
file type. For convenience choose Gif. This will make a good quality image and and the
same time keep the file size small.
That's all!
The drawback to HyperSnap is that they put a logo in the
upper left of the screen unless you have the full registered version of the program. You
should take this into account when taking your screen shots. You can see an example of
this in this Image
There are a few other things to keep in mind with both
programs. Remember that the cursor will be captured in the image. If possible keep it as
far to the edge of the screen as possible so that it wont be the main focus of the pic. We
can edit these images that you take, and most of the times we will. This is done to keep
the size down and keep the page loading as fast as possible. In most cases the cursor can
be taken out. The images will also be converted to gif format. So if you have a program
that does a good job of converting from 24bit .bmp to .gif then go ahead and do it. Also
these programs are only capable of capturing one pic at a time. So you must remember to
stop and save each image as you go if you want to capture multiple images.
Well that's all I can think of to mention right now. If
you have anything to add or notice anything that I've made a mistake about in here let me
know and it will be amended. I look forward to seeing character pic's and scenes from your
adventures.
