How do I take screenshots?

[Endless Rain]

How do I take screenshots? I need to take one of a bug that caused a planet to have negative population, but I don't know how to do it.

[Billick]

If you're on Steam, F12 will take a screen shot.

[YoukaiCountry]

F12 puts them in a confusing and frightening corner of the hard drive. Go to View > Screenshots in steam to view them, and the 'Show on Disk' button will take you there.

[windgen]

Actually, they also go in the game folder's RuntimeData\Screenshots.  AFAICT Arcen has their own screenshot-taking code, which triggers on the same F12 key as Steam, so you get two copies of the screenshot.

x4000 said that at some point they'd like to get back to having an independent installer and allowing, but not requiring, Steam.  So that probably has something to do with why they haven't removed their screenshot code.  (Although it's probably also developer inertia -- it's something that was handy in AVWW2 and other releases before they started putting games on Steam, and leaving it in didn't break anything, so the path of least resistance would have been to simply let it be.)

Somewhat off topic, but getting away from Steam is something I'd welcome.  I grudgingly accept that the market segment that refuses to purchase games outside of Steam is currently significant and growing, and developers may need to bend to that as an economic reality.  But I still hate Steam.  In case you're curious, here are some of my reasons for hating Steam:

- Steam is, or is quickly becoming, a near-monopoly.  If it goes on for long enough, it means they'll be able to raise prices, stifle innovation, and dictate terms to developers and users.

- It's hard to distinguish between games that are "available through Steam" and games that "require an active Steam account and Internet connection to play."  While Arcen's been very good about making their Steam games run fine outside Steam, many developers don't -- and it can be hard to tell ahead of time.

- If Steam ever goes out of business, decides to terminate your account, or decides to drop support for older games, you'd lose access to many different games on which you'd potentially spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars.  Putting all my eggs in one basket makes me nervous; I'd much rather have each game's online system provided by their developer, even if it meant higher prices for games (due to less economy of scale).

- The Steam business model practically guarantees they'll eventually have an economic motivation to drop support for older titles, because they only get one-time revenue when you purchase a game, but they have to keep the game download / patches on their servers and keep the DRM / multiplayer / achievement function going indefinitely, which costs money on an ongoing basis.

- Steam suffers from severe feature creep.  Achievements.  Social crap.  Global chat.  Every time I log on, I see an announcement that says I got five items in my inventory.  WTF?  I don't care about any of that.  But I'm probably paying for it, and even if I did care about that functionality, I probably wouldn't use Steam's implementation because it's probably second-rate, because Steam's focus is (or should be!) on games.

[Misery]

I personally have never had any problems with Steam.... hell, I attach games that are seperate from it to the main library list, because it's less irritating that way.

As a rule, I'm much more likely to buy something if it's on Steam than if it is anywhere else.  It's just so much easier.  And MUCH MUCH CHEAPER in most cases.  Generally I dont care about prices too much, but seeing them willing to knock 80% off of something (extremely frequently) is pretty great....  and it's not like they do that only with low-priced games.  And the vast majority of my games seem to work fine even when I have to use Steam offline due to Comcast's foul existence.  Only the online-necessary-by-design ones seem to have a problem with this most of the time.

This as opposed to buying something from a store, like Gamestop, where MAYBE almost sorta kinda possibly they might potentially have something resembling a deal where if you meet some damn stupid conditions you might get a whole 7% off (gasp!) while at the same time still managing to pay more than you otherwise would.  I'm so glad I dont have to buy these from actual stores any more.

Same goes with most other online vendors.... I aint too fond of them.  Not after having had Steam for so long.



As for their addition of social crap..... ehhhh.  I just ignore it.  I have a hard time blaming them for that one at all.  Instead, I blame Facebook.  Bloody, bloody Facebook.  They've had so much of an effect on the overall market that now you pretty much HAVE to add social media type crap to things like this, because you WILL lose customers if you dont.   It's all sorts of stupid, but that's the truth of it currently.  I'm never going to understand why things like that are popular.

But since the Steam client never forces it on me.... and for the most part never even makes me aware that it's there.... I dont care much.

As for dropping support from older titles, older games are only going to stop working if they're online, and that has nothing to do with Steam itself, or Valve (unless Valve themselves made the game in question).   Steam handles the achievements, and those stupid cards, and that's pretty much it.   Game servers and connectivity and pretty much every aspect of the game is the sole responsibility of the developers/publishers behind it.  And wether or not they're available in the store is also up to the developers/publishers.  Typically, if a publisher wants to pull the game outta stores, they can do so..... and will also pull the game offa everything that's NOT Steam.   Anno 1404 for instance, has become very difficult and annoying to come by, and not because of Steam or Valve, but because good ol' Ubisoft made the decision to do so.

All in all, I've never had any problems with the service, and people exaggerate the funky hell outta the "DRM" aspect.  The bit that I dont run into, despite having 160 games at this point.