"Stealing" screenshots

Fuzztrek · 2004-03-30T10:01:05

eheh.. let me explain. I''m writting a little app to grab screenshots every so often and save the image. I plan to impliment the ability to upload those screenshots to a remote location after I get the basic functionality of the app down. The "purpose" of this application is to periodically take screenshots from games and post them on the web - sort of a poor-man''s streaming video. If nothing else I''m learning a lot while creating it This has been popular with the World of Warcraft Beta - there are pay programs out there that do this, but they are overpriced in my opinion and lack features. This is so far not prohibited by Blizzard, at least, they said it was neat, so I don''t think I''m doing anything illegal So I''ve seen the gazillions of posts about capturing the screen, but very little information on grabbing something rendered by another application. As far as I know GDI will grab the screen no matter what, however after reading this article at codeproject I thought I would look into capturing the screen with DirectX, as the article notes that it is much faster than GDI. I''m a little concerned, though, as not only can World of Warcraft be run in either D3D or OpenGL mode, it can also be run in either a window or fullscreen (if fullscreen, it can be run at different resolutions.) By capturing the screen with DirectX, it looks as though I''ll have to create D3D device - ontop of the one created by WoW. Is this a good idea? Will it slow things down considerably? Or will it not matter because I am not doing any rendering? Furthermore, is there anyway to figure out what the current resolution of the screen is? I don''t want my program crashing or trying to access an area of the screen that isn''t being rendered to because WoW is running in fullscreen at a lower resolution than the desktop is. I don''t mind sticking to GDI if that''s the only option, but I would like some input if possible. Thanks!