ATI demos - A feature I can't find again...

[Sobek]

Hey guys.

I was wondering if anyone else encountered this before. I was once tinkering around with the 9700 Pro tech demos ATI releaesd (mainly the Car Paint demo) and I hit a key or key-combination, and all of a sudden my screen started flashing...after it finished (took about 15 seconds), I was left with a JPEG file in the Demos' directory. Great...a screenshot I figured. Turns out it was a screenshot that was a little over 4000x3000 in size. Somehow, the app had sampled multiple sections of the screen to combine them into one gigantic image, and it worked.

Does anyone know what I did to acheive this, or how I might go about doing it again?

 

[Humus]

I don't know how you got the large screenshot, but a regular one in .tga format can be had by pressing PrintScreen.

 

[Sobek]

Naturally :smile: Though I thought these earlier demos exported screenshots to JPEG, not TGA (I thought only the x1800/x1900 demos and above started using TGA).

Either way...i'm still totally stumped. I remember while it was flashing it was drawing these brief black boxes around sections of the screen, which would seem to indicate it was building the screenshot based off the different sections, one at a time. How? I just wish I knew...i've read and re-read the release notes and found nothing that makes mention of it, and the in-demo control settings and help says nothing about such a feature.

Is it possible I *somehow* had something active at the time that was capable of doing this? Is it even possible for a 3rd party piece of software to do such a thing to a 3d app and create an 'upsampled' image? I'm so totally stumped...and the worst thing, the biggest bug-up-the-ass about it all, is I accidentally deleted the damn screenshot a couple of months back

 

[Iron Tiger]

I used to go into "debug mode" in the firt Ruby demo (The Doublecross) and take those giant screenshots. I think I had to start the demo in that mode, though, and I don't remember how I did that. But you can pause the demo at any point and freely move the camera for some great wallpaper captures. Lighting doesn't always look right from the way they render it in tiles, though.

 

[Sobek]

Hmm, debug mode?

"demoname.exe -debug" or "demoname.exe /debug" ?

I seem to remember tinkering around with trying to get some kind of debug mode going (out of sheer curiosity at the time), but never with the Car Paint demo...so I doubt that's it.

It's really pissing me off because I just can't possibly think what the hell I did to get that result. But are you saying that debug mode on the Doublecross demo actually enabled you to take such huge screenshots? Do tell!

 

[Sobek]

Well...Debug mode does it almost perfectly. Unfortunately it's got a heap of information onscreen that I don't want, that also shows up in the final highres screenshot.

Is there any way to hide the debug info while in debug mode? When I did this originally (however I did that) it printed the highres image without any silly info clogging things up.

*edit* Never mind, sorted it all out with the magical S key! Wow...each screenshot produces an 81mb TGA file, 100% jpeg is just over 12mb. Any ideas if this is possible on later tech demos like Doublecross and such? I tried it but P (the print highres key) doesn't work...any way to perhaps enable it?

 

[Sobek]

Voila!

<--Click to Enlarge.

3.56mb or so, and that's not the largest res it'll do either. Having so much fun taking such huge shots, trying to get cool looking angles and whatnot.

 

[Sobek]

Here's two more, enjoy!

<--Click to Enlarge.

<--Click to Enlarge.