SWTOR screenshots using FRAPS

Getting the material for this post killed 3 birds with one stone! No, not real birds, metaphoric ones. :p After a long day of slaving over a hot blog, taking these screenshots gave me something to post about, gave me a chance to play with the FRAPS application I bought the other day and… it gave me an excuse to play SWTOR [Star Wars The Old Republic] during the afternoon, guilt free. Come, have a look!

The lady with the dreads is, surprise, surprise, my gunslinger Meeka. 🙂 I have had a Meeka in almost every single MMO I have ever played. Not one of them has ever looked anything like me – they’ve all been tall and deadly – but each one has had a little bit of me in there, in the wish fulfillment department if nothing else!

This latest Meeka is badass with an attitude but I like to think she has a heart of gold – all 24 carats of it. 😀 [Click on the picture to get a better look].

Meeka is quite obviously my favourite toon [gamer-speak for character].

Next up we have a little eye-candy… for me. 😀 Sadly, like WoW [World of Warcraft] and most western MMO’s, the males in SWTOR are all bog ugly, except for this one. Miir is the only cute looking male in the whole game. He also speaks with a very sexy British accent because he is a Sith and all Sith are evil. Something about that didn’t quite come out right… 😉

For those who are interested, most MMO’s are designed around two factions – one good one not good. The reason for this is to give the blood thirsty amongst us a reason to whack at each other in player-vs-player battles. So. Most of my toons belong to the Republic and hence are ‘good’ but Miir belongs to the Sith Empire so he is ‘bad’. Well actually Miir is probably one of the few ‘good’ Sith in-game because that’s the way I play him but you get the idea. Frankly he was just too cute to resist. 🙂

And finally we have Ktah. She is a Republic Trooper and does the whole soldier-speak stuff, like saying ‘affirmative’ instead of ‘yes’. For some reason I find it hard not to role-play her as a poker-up-the-bum moron. No offence to any real soldiers out there. Ktah’s only redeeming trait is that she can be stubborn about ‘doing the right thing’, sometimes even if that means going against orders but generally she’s a bit boring. I also have a Jedi Knight but she is just too boring to post about. Whoever came up with the Jedi Knight concept needs to be shot.

So there you have it – a woman with attitude, a pretty-boy and a soldier. Are all three me? Not likely but they are a lot of fun. 🙂

And now to something less frivolous. Was buying FRAPS a good decision or not? The answer to that is a resounding YES! I love it. However before I start singing the praises of FRAPS I should confess that until now I have been taking screenshots using the most basic of all tools – the PrintScreen button on my keyboard.

Yes, yes I know, only dinosaurs use PrintScreen and MS Paint but you see I really haven’t had to do much graphics work for years so scrooge that I am I made do with the primitive tools available for free. If you have used these two tools then you will know how primitive they are. If you haven’t then I won’t bore you with an explanation. Just take my word for it that it’s a horrible process.

Now to FRAPS. Installation was a breeze and setting the application up for taking screenshots was just as easy. I changed the destination folder from the default folder to a location where I knew I’d be able to find it again. Then I changed the default screen capture key from F10 to F12 and voila, all done.

Using FRAPS has been just as easy. When I see an image I wish to capture I just hit that F12 key and continue playing. Behind the scenes FRAPS takes that image, assigns it a name and automatically saves it to the destination folder I specified. Literally too easy. 😀

So the moral of this post is : if you take more than 3 screenshots in any given year then I highly recommend FRAPS as an easy to use alternative. I bought the application outright because I’m anal like that but I think you can download and use the free version if you want. There may be a few less functions and bells and whistles with the free version but it sure beats PrintScreen and Paint.

cheers

Meeks