Good old standby “Print Screen” doesn’t get the job done when playing Paradox Interactive games like Victoria II or Europa Universalis III. Pasting the outcome to your favorite image editor yields a whole lot of black nothingness. Depressing.
The good news is that Paradox has their own screen capture utility built into the game:
Pressing F11 while playing will take a traditional screen capture. This takes everything visible on the screen and stores it as a bitmap file. Yes, a bitmap file. Not a .jpg, .png, or even the rare .tga, but a .bmp. Below you can see the dogs of Sardinia-Piedmont invading the peaceful Swiss. Jerks. Click any of the images below to see the full-sized picture.
Pressing F12 while playing creates a snapshot of the world map. Suitable for framing, this 5616 x 2160 file will let everyone know exactly how far the British empire had spread. On October 10th. In 1890. Black indicates terra incognita.
At the time of this writing, Steam has just started rolling out their new “Cloud Screenshot” feature, which takes a screen capture and shares it with your friends. This is also apparently bound to F12, so we’ll see how that develops as it gets rolled out to more users.
The eagle-eyes among you might notice that I linked to .png files instead of the original bitmaps. WAIMObandwidth? The original screenshot .bmp was 8 MB and shrunk down considerably as a .png file. What’s really funny is the world map: it started life as a 35 MB bitmap, but when converted to a .png it shrunk to a paltry 246 KB.
Happy mapmaking!