Turning to the Dark Side

Sounds like it's going great Esme.

I had a look at the hairs and clothes this morning, and I already know what hairs I want to replace -- some of those headbands don't look nice on anybody. What is a reasonable polycount for a hairstyle?

Will installing fixes for Uni that I know I will need hurt anything if I don't have Uni installed yet?

@leefish, my Gadwin pics are still coming up solid black in-game. It's a pity the Mac printscreen function doesn't work on the BootCamp side...

For print screen in Bootcamp try : SHIFT + FN + OPTION + F11 for active window only

or

alt+fn+F11 to do a screen capture on a Macbook Pro (fn+F11 maps to Prt scrn on a mac running bootcamp)

It depends what version of Bootcamp you are on

Neither works, even after reinstalling drivers and being sure (for a brief moment) that I'd broken everything. The function keys on my keyboard are non-functional, and yet the computer insists that everything is A-OK. *sigh* Now to try booting the game again to be sure that didn't break...

EDIT: Have I mentioned that I hate Windows?

EDIT 2: Nope, not broken. they keyboard still doesn't have all the shiny keys it's supposed to, but the game, sound, and printer all work. I guess it's back to the in-game camera for me...

For me, taking a screenshot of my desktop (for example) with a mac keyboard using Bootcamp is fn-shift-f11 if that helps. This was discovered by smashing keys until I found the right combination. True story.

I can't remember why Gadwin had more recommendations here but I've been really happy with Fraps. It has to be better than the in-game camera at least? The free version will only save your pictures as bmps, but that's a perfectly nice format. I have my shortcut as "k" (klick!) which doesn't seem to conflict with any ts2 shortcuts. You can also google around for the full version which allows you to save in different formats as well as enabling movie-making.

Into the fray once more! Bon chance, mon amie

I use Fraps too. At one time I tried the version that saves as jpg but found it compressed them too much for my tastes. So I take bmp pics with Fraps and then convert them to high quality jpg in Photoshop.

As for hair poly counts - about 5000 is what I'd consider the max reasonable count for a long hair. Maybe a bit higher if it's a complex style. Most should be lower really, like around 2000 on average, and under 1000 for a simple short style. There are some really crazy ones out there... like 50,000 or even 100,000. Those crazy ones have led many folks to consider 10k hairs low poly, but they're really not. For comparison's sake, an average full body outfit mesh is about 2500 polys.

@shastakiss I did try that combination, but the computer refuses to do anything. It also ignores the number pad and the fancy volume keys, but it insists that the drivers are all correct and there are no problems. A conundrum for another day, I think.

@fanseelamb Thank you! I've seen some pretty high ploy hairs out there, and while I am looking into some default replacements, I don't want to melt the new computer I only just got to work!

I will give Fraps a shot, then, and report back at some point. For now, though, pizza's here, and I still haven't finished Season Three of Game of Thrones, so it won't be right away.

FRAPS works great for me, you can make any key the hot key and the pictures go into their own folder.

The results of the FRAPS test:

Spoiler (Click to View)

I've gotten plenty of CEP fixes and lighting stuff installed, too.