Technical help for writing an AAR

[Bramborough]

There's many ways to skin this particular cat, but here's how I do it:

1. Obtain screenshot by hitting F12 ingame. Steam will automatically save the screenshot (JPG format) to your hard drive. After your game session, you'll also have the option to upload the screenshots to the steam cloud if you like.
2. Once I'm ready to write an AAR chapter, I gather the desired screenies from the default steam folder and copy them to a dedicated folder in my pictures directory.
3. I then modify the JPGs here for size, crop, etc. I use Microsoft 2010 for the editing, but MS Paint works fine too, and is probably already on your computer.
4. Through trial and error, I have found that 1440x810 is a size which posts well. Big enough to cover from left to right border in a spoiler box, without spilling over either side. I play on 1920x1080, so basically I'm reducing the screenies to 75%.
5. I then upload these modified JPGs to an image hosting site. There are quite a few, as Myth mentions. I happen to use imgur.com, and perfectly satisfied with it.
6. Imgur will provide the BBcode tag which will pastes directly into the post text.

This process has been working well for me. Haven't needed fraps. I will note that the steam screenshot folder is NOT intuitive to find on your hard drive, it's buried quite deep. In steam, however, there is a pop-up window after a game session for managing screenshots taken during that session. This pop-up has a "Show on Disk" button which will take you directly to the desired folder. The first time I did that, I just created a shortcut to it.

Separate from screenshots but still related to AAR: For the Pontus AAR, I wrote the whole thing right here on the forum. This gets a little taxing, as even on advanced this text window isn't all that big. A longer post can get unwieldy. For current Egypt AAR, I'm writing out the text in MS Word. Then I copy/paste the text in here, paste in the screenie JPGs, do some formatting (bolds, underlines, etc), I find this much easier and less time-consuming.