Screenshot problem

[Matze]

Well, i have had this problem like over 3 month now, and i didn't care that much.

But if there's already some support forum why don't use it.

If i'm going to take a screenshot, my screen freezes like ~15 seconds, i can't do anything while this time.

For some reasons this jsut happens fo the "first screenshot".
The following screenshots are done in like 1 second.

Screenshot setup is "jpeg" and "max quality" (I already tried to take the first screenshot with lowest gravity, but it had no effect.)

[b00nlander]

same happens for me, game usually freezes for a second or two on the first screenshot

[XtremeBain]

What video card and drivers are you two using?  What about when you try the tga format screenshots?  I believe the screenshot code was taken from BeefQuake or another Q2Engine project, but I haven't heard too much buzz about it being a problem previously.

[Matze]

Well I'm using GeForce 2 MX/MX 400 with the newest drivers from nvidia site. I know thats pretty lame, but considering the game is running very good ~75 fps (vsync) i thought it would be "logical" that i can take a screenshot with a 15 second freeze.

And: TGA screenshots are done in like 0.2 seconds...but they're very big (1.9 MB)

[XtremeBain]

Well the fact that TGA screenshots are fast eliminates the possibility of a slow writing to disk problem.  It sounds like the system doesn't like loading the jpeg compression routines into memory for the first time.  From what I understood the screenshot code was pretty solid.  I'll take looks on other forums to see if others are having this problem.

[jitspoe]

Hmm.  If the TGA screenshot doesn't have this problem, it also eliminates the possibility that it's something with the video card/drivers causing the pause.  How much system memory do you have?  Perhaps the jpeg code is getting paged because it hasn't been used, and it has to retrieve it from the swap file.  Also, look at task manager and see if you have any processes that are hogging up a bunch of cpu or memory.  What OS are you running?

I've never had a problem with the jpeg code, so I can only speculate as to what the problem is.

[Matze]

I've got 320 MB...Running windows XP.

I tried to close every process (which is not needed) and still freeze for that long.

Im wondering why its easier to take tga screenshots when the files are bigger than tje jpeg ones.

[jitspoe]

jpeg screenshots are compressed, which means there's some CPU overhead to run the compression algorithm on them.  This usually isn't much, though.  I take jpeg screenshots on my old 400mhz machine just fine.  I really don't know what's causing the first screenshot to be so slow.  I could try seeing if there's a new version of the jpeg library out -- maybe it would fix the issue.  I'll look into it after I've wrapped up build 16.  You may need to remind me.

[b00nlander]

weird... I couldnt even run dp on a 400mhz:  even my Athlon XP1800+ has 100% CPU load on paintball

[jitspoe]

The newest version of the jpeg library is several years old.  I took the source code and compiled it directly into the paintball2 project instead of using a static library.  Perhaps that will help.  I noticed there were a few different memory management functions.  One tries to use some kind of memory pool to try to optimize the library's memory usage.  That could be what's causing the initial pause.  I did away with that and just used the basic malloc/free implementation.  Hopefully that will fix the issue.

[bitmate]

Will it be released in build17?

[Dirty_Taco]

Post removed

[jitspoe]

bitmate: Yes.

[Smokey]

I have this problem to..i saw a post about it before and it was beacuse the library wasent loaded or something like that.