Welcome to the Elemental beta. First, let me say that if you haven't ever been part of a Stardock beta program, you're in for quite a ride.
Our betas are real betas. Some would even say they're not even that as the games send to start out very very rough and before your eyes, you will see your ideas and suggestions come together to make a great game.
CREATING THE TITLE OF YOUR REPORT
There are 4 basic types of reports. When you create a post, prefece the title with one of the 4 tags:
[BUG]
[CRASH]
[PERFORMANCE]
[SUGGESTION]
Example: [BUG] Kingdom of Altar mining bonus not working
THE BODY OF YOUR REPORT
Once you have created the title of your post we will want to get specific.
Screenshots are very helpful. My program of choice is called Jing. http://www.jingproject.com. It will take screenshots and host your screenshots.
If your report involves a bug, telling us how to reproduce it is important.
Each time you run the game it will generate a file named debug.err in My Documents\My Games\Elemental; you can open it with notepad and post it as with the dxdiag report. Note that it will be replaced each time you run the game, so make sure to grab it right after a crash or major problem without running the game again.
If your report involves a crash or some hardware compatibility issue you think then make sure you run dxdiag.exe (just go to the start menu and run it) and make sure you post the data on pastebin.com or a similar site and link it in your report (please don't post them inline as it makes threads unreadable very quickly).
If it's a suggestion, please keep scope in mind. If it's something that is going to take months to do in order for your idea or request to be done, it's probably not going to happen.
Good luck and have fun!
Example of using Jing and its build in screencast to take an easy screenshot.
(Edited by kryo for extra reporting details.)
Ahh I see said the blind man.
I'm having problems getting screen shots into my posts. Maybe it's because I'm using Firefox, maybe it's because I'm a complete idiot, I don't know. Anyway, I click on the icon whose tooltip says "Insert/edit image", fill in the image URL, and then the image doesn't appear in the post. First one I tried was an image from the jing hosting service, second I tried was from a file on my hard drive.
Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.
Can you give the link to the URL for the picture? That might just be good enough instead of trying to embed it. (It's not firefox, as I'm using that).
Thanks, scottycroft, that's what I ended up doing. I'd still like to know how to do it right, though.
Just looking at your posts, I see you're using screencast.com from jing. However, the links you are using aren't actually a link to a picture, but a link to a regular ol' webpage that hosts a picture. To use the Insert/Edit image button here, you need an URL that ends with .jpg or .png. So go to the page that hosts the picture on screencast, right click the picture and select Copy Shortcut (IE) or Copy Image Location (FF). Use that URL in the Insert/Edit image button on the forums here.
Thanks, that worked!
Ok, I have a question about Jing. How do you take a "capture" without it minimizing the game? Because when I try to use the hotkey to take a capture, the game minimizes similar to pressing alt-tab, and I get a big black box in the top left part of my screen, so I don't get any real screenshots.
I think you need to play the game in non-fullscreen mode...but I'm not really sure. I just use the printScreen button + imageshack.
I second that : play in non-fullscreeen. You'll be able to use jing (and it works really well )
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