Full-city screenshots?

[UbiquitousUK 1]

Hi all. Does anyone know of an easy way to produce a screenshot of an entire city in one big image file?

 

I am trying to produce some images for a CJ and it would be considerably easier if I could just screenshot the entire city and crop out the bits of interest at a later date.

[dazza262 133]

I use Sawtooth's Region Census, which you can download from SC4 Devotion.

 

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=913

 

You do have to register at that site first though.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The maximum shot you can get with the in-game camera can be had by the following procedure:

 

1. Press NumLock.  This will close the GUI.
2. Press the numeral 1 key.  This zooms out as far as possible (maybe too much, try other zooms)
3. Press CTRL+SHIFT+s.  Opens the in-game camera to take a screen shot of the game and add it to your Albums in PNG format.  The camera frame can be altered by mousing around and/or pressing the space key.  When you are ready, press RETURN to make the shot.

The Region Census has the advantage of being also able to take a screenie of your entire region.

 

Best to play with these shots in a vector editor (inkscape, for example) if you want something resizable.  Otherwise, any good graphic editor will do the job.  When posting in a journal, keep in mind that .jpg format loads far quicker than .png files and are much smaller.  You can create them at 100% to keep as much detail as possible, and I don't find them at all objectionable.  I generally use the GIMP because I happen to be on Linux, but Photoshop will do a good job as well.

[UbiquitousUK 1]

Thanks for the replies. I gave the region census a go and I see that it is a convenient way to get region-level screenshots, but what I am really after is a way to be able to screenshot an individual city in its entirity without having to zoom out to do so.

 

It seems like one way to achieve this would be to use a keyboard macro to shift the view along by one screen, take a screenshot, repeat as many times as necessary to get the whole city, and then stitch all of the screenshots together in Photoshop. I had hoped there might be a more straightforward approach. I remember in A-Train it was possible to dump an image of the entire map in one go.

 

 

Edit: I found a (somewhat imperfect) way to do this:

1. Use FRAPS or a similar application to record a video whilst you pan around the view of your city. make sure every part you want in the panorama appears in the video.
2. Use VLC to covert the video you just made into a sequence of images as per the instruction here: http://www.isimonbrown.co.uk/vlc-export-frames/
3. Use the free Microsoft Imace Composite Editor (available here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/) to stitch these images together into one big image.

Here's a quick example I knocked up using this technique as a proof of concept:

 

http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/7295/scene00061stitch.jpg

 

This is still somewhat imperfect. Scrolling around the entire map on close to maximum zoom is somewhat slow/laborious, I guess the final piece in the puzzle might be to record a macro of yourself doing that once so that it too can be automated. This should be possible with a tool such as AutoHotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com).

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Good luck with this.  Remember that whatever you do should fit on screen for the average user.

[memedoug85 36]

OR..... Use print screen and paint......

 

Create a folder on your desktop

Start in top left corner of the region and print screen. Paste this into paint and save the file in the folder called "top left" or something similar

Back in the game, use the arrows on your keyboard to move the screen down. Make sure you capture a part of the region you've already got in the previous file (overlap) - Save this in the folder as "left middle" or similar

Keep doing this for left, middle and right - eg middle top, middle middle, middle bottom

 

Once youve got screen shots of everything (could be up to 9 or 16 paint files) open a new paint and use "paste from" to stitch it all together....

 

Might be the hard way to do it but I have no problem this way