When someone posts to the depot and they fail to provide a screenshot, most of the replies their thread receives is often regarding the lack of a screenshot! Inevitably, this often leads to thread derailment or sends it to an early grave. I thought it'd be a nice feature if a small section of text appeared below the message textbox when posting to the depot that detected whether or not the post contained an img tag - if not, it gave a friendly reminder that more people are likely to take notice if people include a screenshot or two.

Just a trivial suggestion, but it might make the community seem slightly less hostile to new posters!

It's not "inevitable" if it only "often" leads to derailment, now is it?

But I agree that it would be a welcome addition to the Depot forum. At the same time, I understand that it may not be something Matthew would be interested in spending time on. There are more important and more interesting things to do.

Derailment or demise, X-G! Derailment or demise!

Your proposal sounds interesting, but without a screen shot I'm not willing to try it out.

The Depot should estimate the quality of the game you're about to post, and inform you whether you need to bother at all.. And maybe even use the same methods for every forum posting. ...on second thought, let's not go that far.

Seriously though, it's a nice idea.

Actually the practice of NSND is fine but the requirement is unfair. When I last posted a game in th depot, which was deleted because I removed the site for it, I wasn't even required to have a screenshot. What happened to the old days where finding out what it was you were about to play. If Matthew was to add NSND to the bottom of the depot forums then he would have to add the rule to the depot's project submission page. You can't have a requirement in one part of the site and not the other, and if NSND becomes an actual rule then I will just quit posting to A.cc as I don't waste my time coding stuff tha doesn't have anything to do with the game, and screenshots aren't on my TODO list during game production. Whatever happened to the guys I knew that would just play a newb game with no pics or questions asked in order to give advice and guidance to those who posted the game/app(s)? I'm currently working on an allegro game and will say this, the site will have pics, but you will be posting a lot of NSND because I won't waste doing any pics for the forum:D.

What difference does it make? somebody asking a random question about what colour t-shirt to wear on a Friday gets more mention here than when somebody releases a game.

You make this sound like a bad thing.

Nobody is asking you to code an in-game screenshot system, all you need to do is:
-run the game
-press print scrn
-open paint
-paste
-save the file
Worse estimated time: 60 seconds.

I wonder how you manage to code games if you're so lazy to even make a screenshot...

It's a friendly reminder, not a rule.::)

I find getting this line save_bitmap("screenshot.bmp", screen, 0); to be run with a certain keypress a bit easier. Less work in the long run and takes only couple of minutes to code

BMP, teh horror

And may result in HUEG screenshots because screen happened to be much larger than the visible screen.

All decent WM's have image format conversion in file manager context menus

Hueg you say? That certainly sounds frightening
If you don't want to see such monstrosities then replace screen with whatever you call the back buffer or use a sub-bitmap. It'll add a couple of lines but is still simpler than working with paint.

Hueg liek xbox.

I can't believe you people managed to derail a thread about avoiding thread derailment!

C'mon, it's just about pressing CTRL-V, nothing very taxing

Hey, this is A.CC, we're professionals.

That assumes you are running in windowed mode. If you don't want to get window decorations added you'll have to edit the image by hand.

If all you need is a couple of screenshots during the entire lifespan of the project then I can agree that print screen could be easier solution. If you need more then adding screenshot functionality will take less effort.

What about adding some kind of default text to depot topics? Something similar to this perhaps:

Game name: 
Author:
Status:

<img src="screenshots go here" />

Download: [url download link goes here]

Good idea, and even simpler to implement.
Actually it might be wise to also add some default text for the programming forum, in attempt to reduce questions which would require mind reading to solve.

I haven't posted that much with this account, so it wouldn't be bad at all because I live on IRC(quicker help, better conversation, and logged so I can look back when I want). Look at NSND's history, (been here since late 2001) where for a few years there was no NSND stuff, a person posted the others played. Few years later someone got tired of going to links, dead links, or waiting on screenshots (or whatever the reason this sprung up) to load on slow sites so NSND came about. Now a few years after NSND came to grow into a request for a reminder on the Depot forum. So how much longer before someone wants NSND to be a rule in the Depot under the accounts and in the forums?

Don't run windowed mode for taking snapshots. Take the snapshot in fullscreen mode. What'll be in the clipboard is a copy of the screen, with dimensions SCREEN_WxSCREEN_H.

I happen to have code that prevents user posting in the Depot forum whitout images:

<?php

if(posted_in("Depot Forum"))
{
    if(findIMGTAG()==false)
    {
        $a = new Allegro5();
        $a->MindControl("Make an Image of your game NOW!");
        $a = NULL;
    }
}

There aren't the games you are looking for..

I'm surprised that nobody has ever hit Alt+Print Screen before. Give it a try, guys. Fullscreen is not required.

On the topic of games without screenshots, since I think my Zonic thread is closed now, check out the new version of Zonic the Hog. Screenshots included.