Technical help for writing an AAR

[nearchos]

I m thinking of give a try an start an AAR, but unfortunately im not familiar with the technical issues, like how i can have pictures from the game and upload them to show in the thread, if anyone has time to give me some advise it would be highly appreciated.

[Myth]

Glad more people are joining in the AAR fun! Download Fraps and use that program to make screenshots. Then upload them to an image host service like imageshack.us or something similar, and post them here using the little picture button above your post.

[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.

[nearchos]

Thanks a lot guys, its been very helpfull, i hope i will not disapoint the org when i start posting.

[TarheelDan]

Nice! Looking forward to reading :-)

EDIT: Another vote for imgur here, works well and if using screenshots from Steam - you can sort by original filename, ascending and they will be all in a nice order so you can tell what happened when.

Also, you can edit your preferences.script file in c:\users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Rome 2\scripts and change the default camera to debugging (can't remember what number, but it says in the comments) this way you can get real close up to the action

[Hooahguy]

Also, while in a battle, pressing "k" will remove the UI so you can take better screenshots.

Everything else I wanted to say has been covered.

EDIT: imgur.com is my favored place to upload screenshots, as you can upload a lot of screens quickly and easily.

[Bramborough]

Sounds like we're in violent agreement here, but another thing I like about imgur is the ability to create a bunch of separate folders and tag each image. With a little organization, helps a lot in keeping all the screenies easy to find for actually putting the AAR together. That said, I'm sure all or at least most of the other image hosting sites have the same capabilities.

[Hooahguy]

Though I do have a sneaking suspicion that imgur reduces the quality of the screenshots because I think they compress it to .jpeg when usually I upload it as a .png file.

[Bramborough]

Maybe. I'm too techno-ignorant to really understand the difference between the two (I'm sure someone will chime in to explain....).

In any case, maybe that's not an issue for my process, because I start with the images in the default steam screenshot folder, which are jpegs to begin with. So I'm working with same format all the way through.

[nearchos]

Thank you all very much, i ve started my campaign, taking notes and also screenshots.
I hope i will be ready to start posting soon.

[Bramborough]

Sweet! Looking forward to it!