screenshot format

toms · Post by **toms** » November 28th, 2005, 6:08 pm

I donÃ‚Â´t know if this topic is right here...

If I make a sreenshot, it is saved as a .bmp picture.

I donÃ‚Â´t like it. It only takes much capacity from my PC

And I donÃ‚Â´t want to change the format everytime.
Every screenshot has about 2,3 Megabytes!:(

There are other things I have to do

Why not jpg or another compressed-format?

(I use BfW 1.0)

Tomsik · Post by **Tomsik** » November 28th, 2005, 6:38 pm

I don't think BMP is best format, but you don't lose quality, and every program can read them. (even M$ Paint)

toms · Post by **toms** » November 28th, 2005, 6:54 pm

Who needs paint?

Ankka · Post by **Ankka** » November 28th, 2005, 8:00 pm

I didn't know BfW had a built-in screenshot feature...

scott · Post by **scott** » November 28th, 2005, 8:00 pm

I think it is due to a limitation in SDL.

Disto · Post by **Disto** » November 28th, 2005, 8:13 pm

toms wrote:Who needs paint?

Neorice uses it, and he's made *some* of the funkiest art around.

Post by **ivanovic** » November 28th, 2005, 9:19 pm

The reason is simple: it is to avoid a new dependency. This way we do not need to include libjpeg with the binarys. We already got many dependencies. Bitmaps should be fine as first screenshots. You can easily convert them to another format.

Post by **torangan** » November 28th, 2005, 11:07 pm

Maybe they should be saved as PNG images if that doesn't cause huge problem with SDL. I'm rather sure that libpng is already required.

Post by **Viliam** » November 29th, 2005, 9:51 am

How to make changing picture format less annoying:

On MS Windows, I have installed the ImageMagick command-line graphic tool. Then in the Explorer file type menu I choose extension "BMP" and add a new action:

Code: Select all

Convert to PNG
"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.2.0-Q16\convert.exe" %1 -quality 90 %1.png

After this, I simply right-click a BMP file, choose "Convert to PNG" from menu, and it is converted; for example "picture.bmp" to "picture.bmp.png". Then, I delete the old file.

I have also similar actions to convert to JPG (one to 90% quality, another to 75% quality), etc. I think this is as simple as possible without using the command line. A nice command-line solution could be to make a script that converts all BMP files in current directory to PNG files.

Post by **Dave** » November 29th, 2005, 1:24 pm

torangan wrote:Maybe they should be saved as PNG images if that doesn't cause huge problem with SDL. I'm rather sure that libpng is already required.

SDL doesn't support PNG write, only PNG read.

toms · Post by **toms** » November 29th, 2005, 4:21 pm

Ankka wrote:I didn't know BfW had a built-in screenshot feature...

It has maybe no hotkey configured...You find it under "options".